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People, Caroline thought, were like houses. They could open their doors. You could walk through their rooms and touch the objects hidden in their corners. But something - the structure, the wiring, the invisible mechanism that kept the whole thing standing - remained invisible, suggested only by the fact of its existing at all.

When Richard Walker died, he left behind a lifetime of accumulated wealth, estranged and horribly embittered alcoholic wife Caroline, nymphomaniac daughter Minna who is unable to form any real emotional bond with anyone, and suicidal teenage son Trenton who is like Holden Caulfield on steroids. He also left behind a house inhabited by two ghosts, the empathetic Alice and the cynical Sandra.

As the family comes to claim their inheritance, their already troubled lives begin to unravel further. Trenton, recovering from an injury which almost left him dead, moves nearer and nearer to suicide. Minna goes on a desperate orgy of copulation, coupling with all and sundry including the undertaker and FedEx courier. And Caroline spirals down into an alcohol-induced fugue, drinking her way to destruction. The only person who seems to be happy is Amy, Minna's daughter, who is living in childhood's fantasy land.

Trenton can hear the ghosts, especially a newcomer who refuses to reveal her identity to Alice and Sandra. He is urged to cross over to the other side by her; however, he is pulled back into life by Katie, a mysterious will-o-the-wisp of a girl. As the days go by, Alice becomes more and more powerful as she keeps on attempting to set the house on fire which, according to her, will result in her release. Everything comes to a head during Walker's memorial service, with all the various story-lines converging and tangling up and there are enough secrets revealed to fill a dozen Agatha Christie novels.

***

"Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way." Said Leo Tolstoy. This novel could be cited as a book-length example of this statement: only thing is, unhappy would the understatement of the century here. Almost every family in this novel, including the ones of the ghosts as well as various minor characters who come into contact with the Walkers, is almost disastrously broken. Extramarital affairs, heartbreak, domestic violence, murder, suicide - you name it, the story has it.

However, for all it utter bleakness, the author manages to hold our interest - mainly because of the mastery of the narrative. The story proceeds in multiple POVs: those of the dead Alice and Sandra interspersed with those of Caroline, Trenton, Minna and Amy. The ghosts talk in first person, while the live protagonists are portrayed in third person - a narrative device which draws readers into the spirit world, making it nearer to them than the temporal world.

The ghosts are inextricably tied up with the house. Built by Ed, Alice's husband in the first half of the twentieth century, it has passed from her to Sandra to Richard Walker. The rooms are privy to so many things - love, lust, anger, betrayal, disease and death. The story flows linearly in the Walker's timeline, while in that of Alice and Sandra, it jumps back and forth - as it moves from room to room of the building. The house is as much a protagonist as any other in the story: perhaps more so.

***

Why has Lauren Oliver created this convoluted structure to tell a story, which, at its heart, is rather simple? For an answer to this question, I would point to the passage quoted at the beginning of the review. The house, with its rooms, is the metaphor around which the narrative hangs - without it, it would fall flat. Each human being, full of multiple rooms in his/ her psyche, some of which are never opened even by the owner, could be seen as a hoary old building through which generations have passed. What good literature does is to open the doors and let the reader in - and discover the wonders (and horrors!) for him/ herself.

For all its darkness, this is a book worth reading.