Book review | Help for the Haunted: Family drama enhances
suspense  By For The Columbus Dispatch  •   The best scary
stories unfold on the porous boundary between the supernatural
and the ordinary.  The moving and elegantly constructed Help for
the Haunted by John Searles places a tense family drama in the
context of a series of exorcisms.  At the start of the novel, 10
months have passed since high-school freshman Sylvie Mason heard
the gunshots that killed her parents in a deserted church in
their small Maryland hometown.  Sylvie lives under the dubious
guardianship of her unstable sister, Rose — four years her
senior. Rose, beset by her own problems, thinks ice pops make a
good dinner and potato chips a sound breakfast. She also isn’t
interested in helping Sylvie replace the clothes she has
outgrown or in dealing with the hearing loss she suffered
because of the gunshots.  Sylvie’s parents — modeled after the
couple that inspired the summer film The Conjuring — were
amateur exorcists who stored “haunted” a