Mr Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore starts with Clay, one-time web designer for a hip and trendy bagel store, being laid off as NewBagel, trying to survive in a harsher economic climate, rebrands itself as the Old Jerusalem Bagel Company, and don’t see a flashy website and chatty Twitter account as part of their new, old-time image. So Clay retreats down the ladder of technological evolution by landing a job at Mr Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore, whose upper technological limit is a ‘decrepit beige Mac Plus’ and a series of old, handwritten sales ledgers.

The store has some odd rules and odder customers, some of whom belong to a sort of subscription service which allows them to come in at any hour, often in a state of frenzy or distress, return an odd-named volume (KRESIMIR or CLOVTIER) and take another odd-named volume out in its place — always from the ‘Waybacklist’, whose books are not for sale, and whose contents (when Clay ventures to look inside) are strings of apparently random letters. Everything has to be logged in the sales ledgers, from the customer’s card number, to any random details of their appearance and demeanour.

Bored by his long night shifts, Clay brings in his laptop and idly starts building a 3D map of the shop. Spurred on by his new girlfriend, Kat Potente (who works at Google, and is thoroughly immersed in the techno-optimisim of Silicon Valley), he starts to log customers’ withdrawals — and comes up with a surprising pattern that ultimately leads him to the cult of the Unbroken Spine, an organisation devoted to decoding the final great work of Aldus Manutius, ‘one of the first publishers… right after Gutenberg’.

Mr Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore is a book with a foot planted in each of two worlds. There’s the world of new-tech, as represented by e-readers, digital books and Google (whose vast computing power is, at one point, entirely harnessed to try to decode Manutius’ work: ‘on a sunny Friday morning, for three seconds, you can’t search for anything…’), and there’s the other world of old-style print books, a world known to Googlers as ‘OK’:

“Old knowledge, OK. Did you know that ninety-five percent of the internet was only created in the last five years? But we know that when it comes to all human knowledge, the ratio is just the opposite—in fact, OK accounts for most things that most people know, and have ever known.”

But it’s not a novel that comes down entirely on the side of new tech or old knowledge. Mr Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore is about coexistence, working together, friendship — among people and technologies. For, as Clay points out, today’s ‘OK’ is yesterday’s new tech:

“Printing… was basically the internet of its day; it was exciting. And just like the internet today, printing in the fifteenth century was all problems, all the time: How do you store the ink? How do you mix the metal? How do you mold the type? The answers changed every six months. In every great city of Europe, there were a dozen printing houses all trying to figure it out first. In Venice, the greatest of those printing houses belonged to Aldus Manutius…”

It’s a fun read, driven by an inventive mystery-quest plot and some easy-paced, zingy writing, my favourite example being this description of Kat Potente:

“She’s wearing the same red and yellow BAM! T-shirt from before, which means (a) she slept in it, (b) she owns several identical T-shirts, or (c) she’s a cartoon character — all of which are appealing alternatives.”

I suppose it falls into the same category as Theodore Roszak’s Flicker, a favourite novel of mine that I reviewed on this blog back in 2007. But Flicker takes its narrator on a quest through the history of film, and ultimately leads to him discovering a secret society on the verge of unleashing worldwide destruction. Mr Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore is about books — printed books and ebooks — and its secret cult, The Unbroken Spine, is no way near as dangerous as Roszak’s Oculus Dei.

Another thing that added to the book’s charm was its being set in San Francisco, a city I only visited once, briefly, for a few hours (Fisherman’s Wharf and Golden Gate Park), but which has somehow come to be a far more real imaginative presence thanks to novels such as Fritz Leiber’s Our Lady of Darkness, Philip K Dick’s The Man in the High Castle, William Gibson’s Bridge Trilogy, and, perhaps more than any of these, Alfred Hitchcock’s films The Birds (which starts in San Francisco) and Vertigo.

Not a poem for Halloween, this time, but a song:

‘Is there an opposite of haunted?’ asks Steven Naremore, after he and his family move into the Hollow, an isolated, quirky house in the West Country. They’ve been noticing strange things happening, but not the traditional ghostly things. They aren’t being frightened. If anything, they’re being lightly amused and helped. ‘Un-haunted?’ ‘Blessed?’ ‘Charmed?’ The Naremores — father Steven (in investments), mother Kirsty (who has a few failed business attempts to her name, most recent of which was in antiques), daughter Jordan (a teenager who’s modelling herself after the Doris Day/Judy Garland era of film star), and young son Tim (for whom life is a military operation) — come to the Hollow looking for a new start in life, to get away from the city and some unspecified, narrowly averted familial collapse.

Initially, the Hollow seems ideal. Plenty of space for the family to live their own lives together, and plenty of character, too. The previous owner, Louise Magellan Teazle, was the author of several series of children’s books, including the adventures of Weezie and her ghostly friends (one of the stories, Weezie and the Gloomy Ghost, forms a short part of Newman’s novel), and who obviously used the Hollow as an inspiration for her stories’ house, Hilltop Heights. All her belongings come with the house, and Kirsty, who read the Weezie books as a girl, recognises some of the items of furniture, including a magical chest of drawers:

“The top drawer always had the same thing in and the bottom drawer never had the same thing twice and the middle drawer was always a jumble of surprises.”

There’s a nicely done scene where Kirsty plays with the chest of drawers and is delighted to find that, yes indeed, the top drawer does always have the same thing in it (nothing), the middle drawer has a jumble of surprises (a load of coat-hangers, at first), and the bottom drawer seems to have a different thing in it every time it’s opened. At first, there’s a rational explanation: the thing she put in the top drawer fell down the back and into the bottom drawer. Then she thinks that the newspaper she finds lining the bottom drawer on opening it a second time was something she missed seeing the first time. But the next time she tries the bottom drawer, the magical chest of drawers proves undeniably magical. It’s like that scene in Poltergeist where the mother demonstrates how a chair always slides back to where it’s supposed to be: a moment of fun with the supernatural before the full-on horror begins.

Newman’s An English Ghost Story, though, isn’t your traditional haunted house story. Things don’t move so quickly into terror. There’s a long honeymoon period in which the family members discover their own way of playing with the magical presences of the Hollow — Tim incorporates them into his soldier-games, Steven receives the odd hint or warning via his computer screen-saver, Kirsty has her magical chest of drawers, and Jordan finds a wardrobe full of all the clothes she could ever want.

But things do go wrong. It’s not, though, that the ghosts turn nasty. Rather, it’s the family members’ own troubles that are amplified and enacted by the supernatural presences in the Hollow. Things take a decidedly downward turn when Jordan’s city boyfriend, Rick, fails to turn up on schedule, and her Doris Day ideal gets torn up in an apocalyptic tantrum. Suddenly, the family are at each other’s throats like they were in their old home in the city, only this time they’re surrounded by supernatural presences all too ready to turn the slightest dark whim into a very dangerous, nightmare reality.

“My original concept was to invert the formula of The Amityville Horror or The Shining (and many many others) — instead of a family being driven mad by a house, a house is driven mad by a family,” says Newman in this interview. And the novel is very much about family — how a family can collapse in on itself, into a kind of emotional black hole from which no one can escape, but also how, if they come through that, they can emerge stronger both individually and as a unit.

An English Ghost Story isn’t a straightforward horror, nor is it a creepy style of ghost story. Rather, it’s a sort of nightmarish black comedy, laying bare the murderous undercurrents in a typically atypical English family, told from the point of view of each of the four family members, in a world of ‘What you give… is what you get.’