Claire, a bit fat, a bit unfashionable, has a friend called Sophie - Sophie Antigone Warbeck Macallan - who is the very height of everything voguish. There’s money, artistic talent and not least a gorgeous new flat in Notting Hill: ‘the land of silk and money’. Sophie has it all. And ghosts.

They play in her flat, these ghosts. Music. Seeing as how they are the unquiet spirits of the Drunken Boats, a rotten Prog-rock outfit whose members died in violent circumstances at the arse-end of a single unmemorable LP. Someone suggests the house should have a Black Plaque: ‘It’s like a Blue Plaque, only black.’ But Sophie doesn’t too much mind. And Claire is simply jealous. Sophie even finds a new boyfriend in the bookish Robert who lives upstairs. Until someone mentions that no one lives upstairs. Leastways, not since a man called Robert slashed his throat from ear-to-ear in the bathroom a dozen years ago.

This is a good fifty pages too long. Having established her characters, Billson labours extraneous detail in the second half to the book’s detriment. But even so, Stiff Lips has more invention and style than Campbell’s last, and ostensibly similar, The House on Nazareth Hill. The balance of her ghosts between fear and favour is deft and successfully off-sets the rather tired yuppie comedy stuff that’s simply a Suckers hangover. And if the clinching Halloween party makes for a crude pay-off, at least she does it with no little wit and panache. The title and the cover may be crap, but the contents are far less James Herbert than you might think.