In this psychological horror novel, a cancer-stricken widow attempts to sell a house that she knows is inhabited by ghosts. The dwelling in question is a large semi-renovated three-story house that boasts such features as a clawfoot bathtub that mysteriously fills with blood, a garden full of ghostly, giggling blonde children, and a dark closet that mysteriously sucks the inhabitants into a world filled with spirits.

If these scenarios seem eerily familiar, it is because they have been done to death on the big screen and elsewhere. The Dwelling often feels like a list of author Susie Moloney’s favourite otherworldly scenes from film, literature, and TV. The alleged terror in the novel is of the Amityville Horror variety: ghosts type messages on computer screens, toys move by themselves, and nymphomaniac sylphs molest lonely people in the night.

Thrown into the mix are a few classic Stephen King devices that had readers on the edges of their seats back in the 1970s, such as the vile voice from beyond the grave that whispers evil suggestions to the chronically depressed and the non-existent gramophone that plays faint strains of music in the night.

As the house is passed from owner to owner, the reader is exposed to long stretches of exposition that turn what could have been a taut thriller into a series of banal interior monologues. Moloney’s characters are also uniformly unlikeable. Too many pages are spent on the amoral, self-pitying real estate agent who vomits up her meals in between writing ads to sell the place. Then there are the victims of the spirits of the house: the dope-smoking comic book artist and his shopaholic social-climbing wife; a suicidal infidelity victim and her bullied overweight son; and a self-absorbed, alcoholic writer whose long internal monologues destroy the story’s pacing.