There is a reason why The Ring and The Grudge, two blockbuster Japanese horror films, have haunted people's dreams across the globe. My country is one of the fortunate ones to have experienced that reason--that is, the terror that these movies seem to enwrap around our bones. In The Girl from the Well by Rin Chupeco, the legendary long-haired, white-clad ghost has been recast to a whole new story of possession and exorcism, familial love, and the sacrifices we make for the common good of everyone instead of oneself. 
 Although the horror element in this book, in my opinion, is rather subdued it never failed to pry my eyes and mouth wider, so that I received, in return, a curious glance or two from the nearby people with which I fought my hardest to read. Imagine the sight of me standing in the middle of the rain, my hand aching from clutching the umbrella for far too long, while the other, equally hurting from holding my phone and positioning it in mid-air before my face, and finally, rainwater bounching off the pavement and landing on my sneakers. A rain-soaked city in the midst of festivities is the least inspiring place in the world to read; despite that, I finished The Girl from the Well in no time at all. 
 It must have been a hell of a read then? 
 My, my. You won't have any idea unless you take a shot at this one. It may not scare as much as the films did, but it will do better than Kendare Blake's Anna Dressed in Blood. (I understand that the contrast is uncalled-for, but hey, that's just me.) The story line bulldozes across the pages, toppling one plot wrinkle after another. The characters crackle with life, even though we're talking about ghosts here. Despite the triteness in the characterization there is something crisp with the way they were presented and challenged in the story that made them work for me. Hence, I should give credit where it is due--the author. 
 Rin Chupeco, I am pleased to observe, has an interesting command with words. She could write, all right; but where there is goodness, there will always be its antithesis. Since The Girl from the Well is Chupeco's debut novel, there is room for forgiveness for its faults. Call me an anticlimactic traditionalist, but this sort of prose does not work for me:- 
 (1) 
 "Something 
 gurgles, 
 from somewhere nearby. It is a loud and sudden noise, and it penetrates through the haze of his inebriation, startling him." 
 (2) 
 "It is a wide, staring 
 eye 
 and it is looking back at him." 
 (3) 
 "For a long moment we stare at each other--he, another girl's murderer, and I, another man's victim. Then my mouth widens further, and I 
 de 
 tach 
 myself from the ceiling to lunge, my unblinking eyes boring into his panicked, screaming face." 
 Right. I have never been a fan of enjambed poetry because it is too exhaustibly jerky (wordly speaking, of course) to my taste; I personally prefer rhetorical lines. I have never been a fan of Tahereh Mafi because of the same reason. I understand that enjambents can cut like knives for emphasis, but when done without so much of a painstaking skill of how they work, they flap like flaccid penises. Had e.e. cummings not started this whole stupid acrobatic syntax, we would have had better poets and novelists. But again, that's just me. I just wish that writers of prose would leave this stuff to the writers of poetry. I am a traditional sonavabitch, but let's admit that this kind of experiment in prose needs to see some cessation. 
 I enjoyed The Girl from the Well, but its occasional interruptions of runover lines plucked off that one star that would have completed a five-star review; nevertheless, I think Rin Chupeco is a promising writer. I immensely think so that I am going to read next the sequel, The Suffering.