Your potential new literary BFF is immediately demoted to those black, murky waters of the very back of your mind. Then the phone rings, or your kid wakes up too early from his/her nap, or the laundry is ready. You make a mental note to read more by the same author. It happens every once in a while, and I’m sure you can relate: You read a book. After that, Andew Pyper somehow disappeared on my literary radar for a couple of years. I stumbled upon the former novel (Pyper’s much acclaimed debut from 2001) at a book sale half a decade ago and immediately found myself sucked into his atmospheric, engaging account of a coke-fuelled Toronto lawyer travelling to rural Ontario where nothing is as it may seem. The other two reasons are called The Lost Girls and The Killing Circle. The first, arguably strongest, reason has to do with my obsession with haunted houses. There are three reasons for my picking up The Guardians and gulping it down in three tense reads – which, as any parent of small children will know, is as close as you can get to reading a book in one sitting. Which is why I came to read Andrew Pyper’s new novel The Guardians.Īctually, that’s not one hundred percent accurate.

Now, I’m no psychoanalyst (sometimes a cigar is just a cigar) but like I just said, I happen to be a big fan of the haunted house genre, whether it is portrayed in cinema or in literature. Why, a psychoanalyst would probably even argue that the haunted house is the people living in it, their inner demons channelled through the menacing creaks and moans of the building and what have you. It is such a classic, simple set-up, really yet there is so much room for exporation not only of the haunted house but of its inhabitants and their hidden inner rooms. For as long as I can remember, haunted house stories have intrigued me.

The Guardians by Andrew Pyper