It's a being that's neither alive nor dead, and it's been protecting the Kidds for generations.
No Kidd family members need ever get sick or hurt - the thing in the house will protect them.
Unless they do something to offend it.
Then it really gets mad.
Ray and Jack Kidd are the latest generation to live in their family abode. Both single, and ever vigilant not to offend their protector, they live with the ever present pall of fear and foreboding hanging over them. Their protector prowls the second floor of their home - a place both Kidds fear to tread.
And Ray Kidd is sick of it.
So sick of it he wants to test just how far the "hate-haunt" (as he calls it) will let him stray.
The answer is: not far.
Jack is more introspective, a quiet bachelor without too much of a life. But he has met a girl called Rachel and fallen in love with both her and her kids, Nick and Tricia.
To survive, the "hate-haunt" needs new members of the Kidd family. And because of this, it lets Rachel and the kids into the house. But not without taunting them and scaring them half to death! The hate-haunt needs to have some fun now and then...
Rachel figures the only way to beat the entity is to know more about the thing that lives on the second floor of the ageing building she and her kids call home, so she hires PI Craig Ryce to find out more. Ryce manages to do so, but in the process brings them all to the very edge of danger.
Meanwhile, psychic Andrew Jordan (through his channelled entity, "Eight") is receiving messages that soon the Kidd's will need his help as a matter of life and death. "Eight" has never been wrong before.
Just what or who is the "hate-haunt"? Is it alive or dead? And what does the mysterious great-grandfather, Howell Kidd, have to do with it all?
J.N. Williamson has turned out a spellbinding tale of horror and possession. Very rarely a book comes along with such strong characters and a plot driven by both emotion and action. You'll be scared to turn the next page and the characters will stay with you even after the ending - an ending that will leave you re-evaluating the whole novel. The feeling of damp, dark terror in the house seeps from every page and makes you feel any house could contain a hate-haunt such as this one.
