The lamp is on. You know the lamp is on; you can see it. And yet, at the end of every paragraph in which a door opens by itself, you will look at the lamp, as though it might have changed its mind.
This is not a weakness. It is a reasonable response to reading something designed by a professional to frighten you, alone, in a house that makes noises. But it does slow the reading down, and the book is good, and you’d like to get through it before the sequel comes out. So.
1. Sit with your back to a wall
Not a window. Not a doorway. Not the hallway. A wall. Preferably a corner, so that there are two walls, and the entire room is in front of you, where it can be supervised. Horror works by making you feel that something could be behind you. Remove “behind.” You now have a 180-degree problem instead of a 360-degree one, and the maths is on your side.
2. Make the room boring before you start
Close the wardrobe. Draw the curtains all the way, so there’s no gap for the garden to look in through. Move the dressing gown off the back of the door, because at 11 p.m. a dressing gown on a hook is a man. Put the cat somewhere you can see her. The cat is your early-warning system: if she doesn’t react to the noise in the hallway, it is the radiator. If she does, close the book and go to bed, and we’ll speak no more about it.
3. Pick your lighting with intent
Overhead light: too much, you’ll feel watched. Phone torch: absolutely not. The correct setup is one warm lamp beside the chair, low, pointed at the page, and one small light on in the next room so that the doorway is not a black rectangle. The black rectangle is the whole problem. Deny the book its rectangle.
4. Read the scary bits fast and the calm bits slow
The author has built the chapter like a staircase: calm, calm, calm, creak. Most readers slow down at the creak, because they are afraid of it, which is exactly where the author wants them to linger. Reverse it. Take the calm pages at a stroll and the frightening pages at a run. You’ll feel the fear, you’ll just feel it for less time, and you’ll arrive at the next chapter heading breathless, which is roughly the intended effect without the forty minutes of staring at the lamp.
5. Keep something stupid nearby
A biscuit. A mug with a joke on it. A sock with a case number on the cuff. Something that belongs to the ordinary daylight world and is impossible to take seriously. When the house settles and you look up, look at the stupid object first. It will remind you that you are a grown adult in a chair who chose this, and that the thing in the attic in the book is in the book.
6. Know your stopping place
Never stop at the end of a scary chapter. Read on into the next one, even two pages, until the characters are doing something dull: making coffee, driving, having an argument about money. Put the bookmark in there. You want the last image in your head before sleep to be a kitchen, not a cellar.
7. Accept the lamp
You will still check it. Perhaps twice a chapter instead of twice a page. That’s a good night. The lamp is on. It was on the whole time. It’s a lamp.
Spoiler. Click if you have already found the body.
Nothing is in the hallway. It was never in the hallway. It was, in every book, inside the house the whole time, which, now that it’s written down, is not more comforting.