Adcock’s novel, her first, seems initially no more than another of these cozy domestic hauntings, distinct only in its setting — suburban Texas, rather than the usual rural Northeast. The young family here consists of Bridget; her husband, Mark; and their infant daughter, Julie. Bridget is ambivalent about having given up the practice of law for motherhood; Mark works punishingly long hours as a web designer; and Julie’s just a cute kid. Into this banal life steps a mighty insistent spirit, the shade of a dead woman who seems unhealthily interested in the little girl.

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Adcock describes the specter vividly: “The edges of her body, her head, her limbs, seem constantly to be shifting, growing enormous and grotesque and then shrinking, angling away, diminishing to an equally grotesque size, out of proportion to what her body seems to want to be. It is like watching a maddened Picasso try to struggle out of its frame.” The ghost becomes a constant, vaguely threatening presence in the family’s otherwise ordinary lives, and Bridget goes haywire trying to get it to go away. She doesn’t know, or especially care, who the dead woman was. But the reader does, because in alternating chapters “The Barter” tells the story of another frazzled wife and mother, named Rebecca, who lived a brief, unsatisfying farm-country life in the early 20th century, before the bright suburbs claimed the land.

Rebecca’s tale of her ill-fated marriage is interesting, deep and sad, and it gives perspective to the doubts and minor irritations of Bridget’s relationship with Mark. It’s as if this house had been invaded by an unfamiliar sort of gravity, a sense that life can be heavy and consequential in ways good suburban mommies and daddies only dimly understand. In a way, this sorrowful spirit allows Adcock to make excellent sport of the culture of modern middle-class parenting. With the ghost looming, the petty concerns of the local young-mom cadre look dopier than ever to Bridget, who gradually loses patience with the conventions that rule her narrow world. We see her measuring her old, trivial anxieties against this huge new thing, this fear, as she begins to realize that what you’re afraid of is part of who you are. “The Barter” is a thoughtful and surprisingly witty novel. It weighs its horrors precisely.

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And that’s a crucial quality in this genre: Horror works best when it’s about things that are actually worth being afraid of. Like Siobhan Adcock, the English writer Chaz Brenchley, who tells a bizarre coming-of-age story in his lovely short novel BEING SMALL (Per Aspera; cloth, $19.99; paper, $9.99), knows how to give some heft and gravity to the anxieties of everyday life. His narrator, 16-year-old Michael, is, like every teenager, trying to figure out who he is, but his version of that perennial problem is unique: He was born with his dead twin, whom he calls Small, inside his own body, and feels him there still. Michael and his ditsy mother live a bohemian life on the fringes of Oxford. They speak of Small as if they were describing a real person, and although Michael protests that his phantom brother “is not a metaphor, for my use or anyone’s else,” that is, of course, exactly what Small is: an embodiment of Michael’s ambivalence about the person he is, or is not, becoming. He tries on ways of interpreting his resident alter ego: “He can be my cold and unreachable heart, the figure in my carpet, the ghost in my machine; or he can be my savior, my criterion, deus ex machina, the point of my perspective.” He comes closest, perhaps, when he refers to Small as “the mote in my inward eye” because the issue, throughout, is how Michael sees himself: whether he feels he’s living his own life or someone else’s and, come to that, which life he would prefer. Not much of a truly horrific nature happens in “Being Small” — Brenchley’s tone is quiet, contemplative — but it’s intensely dramatic, in the way adolescent problems tend to be, in teenagers’ inward eyes. “It might be war,” Michael announces, “where only the strong survive.” Brenchley makes this tooth-and-claw battle thrilling.