Eric and his daughters, Dess and Stacy, are on the run. From who? From what? You have to be patient to find out the why in Johnny Compton’s novel The Spite House. They can’t ever seem to get ahead, though, because Eric has to take jobs that keep them off the grid. Then he finds an ad for a job that “promised “high six figures at minimum upon completion of the assignment, with a much larger upside for the qualifying candidate.”” I mean, if something seems too good to be true, it probably is, right?

But Eric is desperate, so he lands an interview with Eunice Houghton, an old lady who owns a property in Degener, Texas. She needs a caretaker for the Masson House aka the spite house, which Eric explains to his daughters is “A place built just to make someone upset or show the world how pissed you are.”

The spite house is haunted. Eunice has had several rounds of paranormal investigators there. The last ones, Max and Jane Renner, well, let’s just say, it didn’t end well. Basically, all she is asking is that Eric stay there and keep track of any not-of-this-world activity. If it’s too much for Dess and Stacy, they are welcome to stay in Eunice’s mansion. What can possibly go wrong?

Well, of course, lots of things can and do, but for me it wasn’t scary. The ghosts haunting Masson House are vengeful. It seems, at least Eunice thinks, they are looking for payback for something Eunice’s great-great grandfather did back in the day. The land is cursed. Peter Masson, the man who built the house, is also cursed. But there are children in the house, too. How are they connected?

It takes a long time for things to be revealed in this book and it’s pretty much all exposition. Eunice telling Eric the family history; Millie, a local writer, filling in the blanks. There are lots of perspectives in this novel, perhaps too many. It ends up feeling pretty repetitive and it definitely wasn’t a page-turner. More time in the house and perhaps a tighter plot (there are a lot of side stories that just didn’t add to the story overall, and weren’t fully explored — the children in the Masson House, for example) might have helped move things along.

I guess this was Compton’s debut, and it shows promise, for sure. But it was just okay for me.