Now that I’ve finished reading the novelisation, I’m so eager to watch the film that came before it. The story was creepy enough in book format–and it honestly takes you on quite the journey–so I can’t imagine how tense it would be to view on the screen. And, goddammit, this book was another one that made me feel actual emotions as it progressed! Seeing it acted out with the added touch of visual stimulus and uneasy music would be an incredible experience for sure!

We follow an asbestos prevention crew that have been tasked with getting the closed Danvers mental institution cleared out and prepped to be repurposed as a new governmental building. At the heart is Gordon Fleming, the owner of the company who has just become a father. Anxious for financial aid to help pay for his young family, he accepts the big job to make ready the Danvers Hospital in an impossibly short amount of time. So desperate he is for payday to come, Gordon then even pushes for the deadline to come sooner, despite the fact that doing so also means pushing himself and his crew to breaking point.

And so it begins gradually: the crew making their way through the eerie building with a growing sense of unease. Knowing the type of story that I’m reading, I was already on the edge of my seat in anticipation; especially with such high personal stakes already being made apparent so early on in the story. And quick enough, the whole thing descends into madness when the crew comes upon some taped sessions left behind from when the building was still a hospital.

The character of the building is sinister enough by itself, let alone without the added stakes of supernatural horror. The realities, and sometimes awful exploitations, that go on behind closed doors in a mental ward is hair raising to think about alone, but when you include on top of that the disembodied voices that echo the hallways and the newly discovered patient tapes? Well, it’s no wonder that the members of the removal team each become so erratic and their minds fragmented.

Which the book preys upon brilliantly! Francis is subtle in the way that his writing pokes at the crew’s anxieties and issues with each other; plucking at the already tentative relationships between them until trust fails completely. There’s a foundation of unease threaded throughout the novel from the start all the way until the end, and Francis manages to believably break down the different psychological layers one by one. It’s all just so incredibly spooky, building steadily to have you holding your breath in quiet expectation, your imagination doing a lot of the work for you.

What Session 9 does so well, too, is atmospheric horror: delivering a growing sense of dread as the story progresses. Its grip on you tightens the more that you read and the story is just so tense at times that I felt as though I was also walking alongside the characters as they moved through the abandoned asylum. Anticipation is a dangerous thing, and the occasional chills I experienced were stressful. Fun, but stressful. As such, I was engaged in the story in an unwilfully willing way.

Awareness dawned on me on where the story was going and I actually found myself feeling a wee bit nauseous with the realisation. And when it did finally come to pass, I was left with a feeling of such emotional sorrow. I was struck by the ache that was in my chest, but it was there because I had come to care for these characters, and so to see the fear and suffering that they experienced left an impact.

Session 9 is a story that is meant to confuse and it does so quite expertly. It definitely doesn’t hold your hand through the narrative, leaving you as the reader to figure things out and understand them yourself: my favourite kind of story.

So if you’re fancying something unsettling and sinister in these dark winter months, maybe this is one book to give a go!