The Night House is a stand-alone novel by best-selling Norwegian author, Jo Nesbo. It is translated by Neil White. Fourteen-year-old Richard Elauved is fairly new in Ballantyne, having moved in with his Aunt Jenny and Uncle Frank after his parents died suddenly and traumatically. At school, he’s in the pariah class or, as the boy he calls Fatso tells him, the piranha class, but the lovely Karen Taylor, smart, pretty, and quite the rebel, is inquisitive about him.

When his classmate, Tom, also in the pariah/piranha class and last seen with Richard near the river in the Mirror Forest, goes missing, the police eventually decide that Richard is responsible. No one will believe that Tom was sucked into the telephone receiver in the phone box on the edge of the forest when they prank-called a random phone book entry, Imu Janasson. Karen is less sceptical that the rest, though, or at least she believes that he believes that is what happened.

Then another classmate goes missing shortly after being in Richard’s company. After what happened when he and the boy went to the vacant house in the middle of the Mirror Wood, Richard is convinced that there’s an evil presence there. Police interrogations are unsatisfactory, and lie detector tests have them concluding that he is a hardened psychopath. He’s sent to a youth correctional facility. Things just get more bizarre from there.

Initially, Richard quite an unlikeable protagonist, a nasty bully whose pranks have some grisly results that put him on the wrong side of the law. Is he a reliable narrator? Is he telling us the truth about his classmates’ deaths, or was he hallucinating? Or is it all a cover for his nastiness?

Nesbo gives the reader a story within a story within a story, and each one has echoes of the others. One has very much a classic teen horror story feel, often blackly funny, and the whole has some excellent twists and surprises.

He gives his characters some wise words and insightful observations: “Sometimes if you tell a lie enough times. It becomes a bit true anyway” and “You should never trust your memory. It only ever gives you what it thinks you need” are examples. An excellent psychological thriller.