The Screaming Staircase
2.0 Stars
1-1-2015

A very young adult book. The book describes what Conquest of Elysium players know as a Conjunction with the Plane of the Dead, where the spirits of the departed come back to haunt the places where they died. The proper response is to abandon old castles, battlefields, graveyards, gallows, and large cities, as they will simply produce too many ghosts to be held. You should consolidate your forces in the more productive farming villages and market towns until the Conjunction has passed, at which point you can begin rebuilding and re-taking your land. In this book though London is still using young adults (who are more psychically sensitive) to try and combat the growing ectoplasmic menace. The haunted house and ghost scenes are actually alright, so kudos to the book for getting its core correct. Everything besides the haunted house scenes is not necessarily bad, but it is extremely simplistic, like you would expect to see in a kid's movie. Characters are very 2 dimensional, the dialog is kind of flat, the plot beats are clear ahead of time even to someone oblivious like me, etc. etc.