One of the important plot points in Tana French’s novel Broken Harbor involves an unknown animal or animals supposedly invading the attic of one character’s house, terrorizing the children and causing the husband to engage in increasingly irrational behavior.

While I was reading these sections we starting hearing rats in our attic again for the first time in four years. (We feed birds. We’re going to have critters. And they’re eventually going to get in.) We’ve called the exterminators and the bill is going to be a big one this time around, since it involves ripping out all the insulation and plastic in the crawl space. And I still don’t know what they’re going to do about the attic, and how they’re going to get past all that blown-in insulation.

This was all bad news. But seriously, the worst part of the  whole experience was reading Tana French’s creepily evocative descriptions of mysterious animal noises in the attic while hearing them in my own house. No fair! Really!