From Goodreads: Siler House has stood silent beneath Savannah’s moss-draped oaks for decades. Notoriously haunted, it has remained empty until college-bound Jess Perry and three of her peers gather to take part in a month-long study on the paranormal. Jess, who talks to ghosts, quickly bonds with her fellow test subjects. One is a girl possessed. Another just wants to forget. The third is a guy who really knows how to turn up the August heat, not to mention Jess’s heart rate…when he’s not resurrecting the dead.

The study soon turns into something far more sinister when they discover that Siler House and the dark forces within are determined to keep them forever. In order to escape, Jess and the others will have to open themselves up to the true horror of Siler House and channel the very evil that has welcomed them all.

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If you like ghost stories, than this is the book for you.  Muto is an exceptional storyteller, and The Haunting Season is a great read that will have you looking at mirrors differently for a long time to come.  Some terrible things have come to haunt Siler House, and naive Jess Perry is about to learn that not all ghosts are as nice as her grandmother’s.

I really enjoyed this novel.  I have a tendency to read ghost stories at night in order to get the thrill of the scare, and let me tell you, this novel delivers.  The eeriness of the novel didn’t show up right away, but rather slowly creeped upon me as I read, and that, in my opinion, is what makes the story truly scary.  I also liked the set up of this novel, with four young adults coming together for a research study at the famously haunted Siler House.  Jess represents the naivety of the young.  She can see ghosts, but has only ever dealt with the kind ones, and thus believes all spirits are caring and compassionate.  Allison represents hysteria as we soon learn that she was once possessed by demons and believes that something terrible is coming for them.  Her rash actions and hysterical cries put her peers, and the reader, on edge, as she predicts a terrible omen to come.  Gage represents the hot, bad boy image, but his gift/curse is the ability to bring back the dead.  And believe me, it isn’t pretty.  And Bryan, the last of the lot, represents the unknown as he is able to move things with his mind and, ultimately, make them disappear.

These four characters are together in Siler House, learning its history and exploring the rooms, but as time goes on, it becomes apparent that not all ghosts are good, that Allison might not be insane after all, that the experiment they are conducting isn’t truly to benefit them, and that all of them have been brought together for a reason.  This was a thrilling ghost story, which I highly suggest reading late at night in order to obtain the ultimate chills.  Four stars.

I purchased a copy of this novel from Amazon.