The Harrowing by Alexandra Sokoloff

Take five "discarded" college students, an empty eerie old dormitory, a raging storm and a half-burnt Ouija board and you've the fine ingredients for a superb ghost story. Fortunately author Sokoloff delivers a first rate novel that does not disappoint. In fact, it is so good she has been nominated for the prestigious Anthony Award in the Best First Novel category.

According to Sokoloff, The Harrowing is based on the real life experiences she lived through from her high school and college days. She formed the main characters from her years teaching emotionally disturbed and jailed teens within the Los Angeles County prison system.

The book puts five unlikely students together during the Thanksgiving weekend in a mid-western campus. As the rain douses the dark, lonely Baird College Mendan Hall our main characters seem to gravitate toward the same desolate entertainment room: Robin, the daughter of a mentally unstable mother and a father who doesn't want her; Lisa, a tease; Patrick, a steroid driven football player; Cain a brooding musician and last Martin, the agnostic son of an orthodox rabbi.

None want to go home. They quickly become a whole unit over a seemingly prank-filled supernatural board game that brings to like a sixth unseen being. Terrifying things begin to happen to each member of the newly formed group. Through research they uncover a plot by the spectrum to kill them all and possibly others in its wake to take over the building.

They lose a member to the being-but why, how and when will keep you reading non-stop until the very last turn of the page.

Alexandra Sokoloff has put together one of the most entertainingly eerie ghost stories I've had the pleasure to read.