I had the most enjoyable time reading this book. I’m usually not a horror fan, but Lauren Willig’s “What Happens at Nightfall” is a perfectly delicious combination of horror, humor, and romance and I couldn’t put it down. Of course, I was a fan of her “Pink Carnation” series over 20 years ago, so I love this return to clever repartee, ridiculous situations, and imperfect characters who fit together perfectly. (I am not saying that her historical fiction doesn’t contain clever repartee! But there are definitely no demons or ghostly apparitions.)

We first meet Jess Waters, who is unemployed after becoming a whistleblower in her last job. As they say, no good deed goes unpunished, and because of that, Jess is being sued and harassed and finding it difficult to get a new job. But on the evening in question, Jess has agreed to join her childhood best friend Kimmy for an evening tour of the famous Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn. It’s dark, there’s the sound of breaking glass and a scream, and three boys run by snagging Jess’s huge carry-all and dumping all its contents on the ground.

Jess urges Kimmy to stay with the group as she collects her belongings, but then she hears crying nearby. It’s a ten-year-old who is sobbing under a tree. He lives nearby because his father is the cemetery’s arborist, so Jess decides to walk him home before rejoining Kimmy. On their very creepy walk through twisty paths with strange noises, a frigid howling wind, and monuments that seem to move in the dark, we realize — in the very first chapter — that this is, indeed, a horror novel.

The boy’s name is Ben. His father is the arborist, Adam, and his older sister is Melinda. They live in a house on the cemetery grounds. Their mother, Kate, died four years ago, and they are all still struggling to be a family without her. Ben confesses to opening the family mausoleum that belongs to his mother’s wealthy family, and they go there to make sure it’s locked up again. There they find the umbrella that Jess’s tour guide had, and Jess offers to return it to the owner. The next day, when Jess goes to return the tour guide’s very unusual umbrella, she sees strange documents and photographs of Melinda and Kate’s ancestors on a wall in the tour guide’s studio apartment/place of business.

There’s no mystery at all about the connection between Jess and Adam. We sense that from the start, and since both are extremely likable, imperfect humans, we really want the relationship to work. But relationships aren’t easy in the best of times, and when you throw in a widower with two adolescent children, an unemployed and insecure woman, a ghost and a demon, there are wrenches in plentiful abundance.

The humor is in large part thanks to Belfagor, the demon unleashed that night in the cemetery. Each chapter is written in third person limited perspective from one of the character’s points of view, and the ones in which we are privy to Belfagor’s thoughts are hilarious. He’s very jealous of one of his peers, Baphomet, who apparently had teased him unmercifully about Machiavelli’s novel based on Belfagor’s troubles with his wife. His delight in causing mayhem and the descriptions of such are priceless.

I especially enjoyed Belfagor’s take on YouTube. “There was potential for havoc there, if only Belfagor could figure out how to use it, as well as this thing people called social media. It was brilliant — no more whispering in one ear at a time, corrupting soul by soul. He could lead thousands astray at a time!”

Another superb piece of writing is when Belfagor possesses one of the characters, the tour guide who is a graduate student trying to entrap him. He’s frustrated by her “petty human memories” coming to the surface. He reflects, “Babies. This was why it was always better to possess babies. They had no memories to bother you with. But then, of course, the drawback was that you had to wait for them to grow up before you could do anything more vicious than pee on people. Possessing a baby was more of a long-term project…”

There are more choice tidbits from that evil demonic creature, but I must leave some for readers to discover as they read. Just know that the demon’s ability to throw thoughts into the minds of humans brings humor to Adam and Jess’s amorous moments and to almost every event in the novel. In addition to the demon, there are ghosts, and trees with heart. There is magic, and there are magical moments. I loved every fantastical page.

It’s a romance. It’s horror. It’s thrilling. It’s set in a really huge cemetery filled with trees and plants (who knew?) in Brooklyn that I now long to visit. It’s brilliant in a can’t-stop-turning-the-page kind of way.

In the acknowledgements, Willig writes, “Next time? Dragons.” I’m in.

This review was first posted on Bookreporter.com.