Someone's Watching, Someone's Waiting

This very chilling book starts with a bereaved mother making a doll like effigy of her dead child and willing it to be part of her family again. Three generations later, Emma is staying with her aunt and uncle and great grandmother at the isolated country manor where the child died, a dismal place echoing with phantoms that only the older woman can see. One day the bored and lonely child discovers an antique doll in her grandmother's room, and soon afterwards becomes convinced that somebody is watching her from a part of the house that no longer exists. Without any of the stock melodramatics of supernatural fiction, Gavin succeeds in summoning up a sense of menace which is rendered all the more powerful by the restraint with which it is described. This is a short, poignant novel, ideal for independent readers who are robust enough to do without happy endings.