Ambrose, David: Superstition

  Amazon  

Parapsychologist Sam Towne runs a research facility that conducts investigations into paranormal anomalies--observable instances of psychokinesis, the movement of matter through psychic power. When he meets Joanna Cross, a staff writer for the magazine Around Town who has just published an article exposing a couple of  mind-readers as con artists, an interesting group project suggests itself: Sam and Joanna decide to enlist volunteers to help them conjure up a ghost. The phantom they have in mind is not your run-of-the-mill, graveyard-haunting variety, but rather a thought-form that the group members will hallucinate into being, after extensive research into the time period from which their ghost hails, and after creating for him an elaborate back-story. The problem is, once you will something into being, it may not be eager to give up the ghost, as it were, when you'd like it to.

David Ambrose's thriller Superstition is intelligent and genuinely scary in parts, and its conclusion, despite being hinted at in a prologue, is impossible to figure out in advance. Part Jack Finney's Time and Again (a book the characters in Superstition in fact discuss), part ghost story, the book--if not offering the sort of suspense that will keep you glued to the pages all night--is well worth the read.