Partington near Sheffield. Eight-year-old Amy's father hoists her to the window of the dank ruin she calls the spider house. Inside she glimpses something, its arms out-stretched. Seven years pass and Amy's mother is dead, Nazarill salvaged as luxury apartments. Among the new occupants, inevitably, are Oswald and his daughter. All is not well between the teenager and her straight-laced parent to begin with, but lurking beneath the paint and plasterboard are other, far older residents with terrible secrets enough to tear this family apart.

The supernatural has set up home here, but a pallid and unconvincing supernatural it is; Campbell's enthusiasm clearly lies elsewhere. Like his last, the grisly psycho-thriller The One Safe Place, these horrors are more corporeal than metaphysical, joyless cruelties visited by one human being upon another.

For, aside from its spirited trappings (this, if you will, is Campbell's Shining), The House on Nazareth Hill is really a novel about child abuse. The second half drips metaphor as Oswald's intolerance is given an out in Nazarill's shadows, and to read too literally is surely to mistake opportunity for motivation. Events have more to do with misplaced Victorian values than simple possession, attempts at reining Amy as much encouraged as condoned by the human residents. The book resembles nothing so much as a harsh rereading of the altogether better Midnight Sun, albeit invoking a hellish vacuum to replace that book's sympathetic mother figure. Anyone familiar with Campbell's childhood - troubled Christmases, estranged father - will be pushed not to read thinly veiled autobiography in each.

As befits his subject this is also Campbell's most unpleasant work in a while. Long guilty of loving his characters just a little too much (think The Influence or The Hungry Moon), The House on Nazareth Hill (dreadful title, incidentally) ends in some really quite appalling violence. Second nature to a Shaun Hutson it may be, but, as Campbell appreciates, context is all. In the end, though, it could all have been so much better. The ghostly stuff looks to be here on sufferance - two novels out of your genre a publishers' no-no? - and it's hands-up to a good 150 pages over the strictly necessary.

But then again this is Ramsey Campbell - with all that brand implies. Like The Long Lost, it showcases numerous passages that transcend its hackneyed plotting, and, if anything, he's writing better than ever. The familiar ingredients are all present and correct but, as his last three prove, the recipe is letting him down.