needs more demons?

Karen Novak’s Five Mile House is unambiguously a ghost story, even a haunted house story — one of the narrative voices belongs to a ghost, and provides the novel with its arresting opening sentences:
I am Eleanor, and I, like this house, am haunted. I died when I fell from this tower, that window. It [...]

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A curmudgeonly speculative-fiction fan I used to know had rules for avoiding crap books that went more or less like this:

Nothing with swords or dragons in the title or the cover
Nothing with a map of imaginary places at the front

There are many counter-examples to prove the rules, and even more bad books not filtered by [...]

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I think the first time my friend Marty and I had a conversation about books, he said something like “I read classic literature [which gave us substantial common ground] and thrillers about serial killers.” [which didn't much increase it] and he expressed a distinct lack of fondness for modern “serious” fiction.
We’ve spent plenty of time [...]

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