The Waldman family – Mom and Dad, eight-year-old Karen, and 12-year-old narrator Mark – move to the area outside of Chilliwack, B.C., for Dad’s new job. They purchase a rundown house on the outskirts of town in which, unbeknownst to them, a young mother and her daughter died in a fire 50 years earlier. (The novel is set in 1965, though there are few cultural references marking it as non-contemporary.) The distraught, drunken husband – who was accused of helping bring about their deaths – later killed himself, cementing the house’s dark reputation among the locals.

Before the happy young family even steps inside the place, strange things start to happen. Pretty soon, they find themselves spooked, stalked, and menaced by the lingering spirits of the people who once dwelled there, and whose grisly deaths have left behind much unresolved emotional and psychic turmoil. To end all this supernatural activity, the Waldmans must find a way to put the house’s former inhabitants to rest.

Clearly, when it comes to Alberta author Richard Stevenson’s haunted house novel, “familiar” refers as much to the storyline as it does to spirits that appear in animal forms – though the book does feature some of those. While it is a breezy and enjoyable ride, with pockets of genuine creepiness, Stevenson never really finds a way to freshen up a decidedly stale formula. And, for some reason, he chooses to downplay the spooks and suspense in favour of long scenes of characters talking out possible explanations for the various hauntings going on around them.

Kids at the lower end of the age-range will enjoy the book’s more satisfyingly scary moments, but even they might find the proceedings more chatty than spooky.