What follows is an account, as I choose to remember it, of my twelfth year on this planet – the summer of the Saturday Night Ghost Club. Uncle C called the inaugural meeting, and in addition to him, our membership roll was tiny: Billy Yellowbird, Lexington Galbraith and me. Later on Dove Yellowbird became the club's lone female member.
In the present, Jake Breaker is a neurosurgeon, husband and father, but back when he was twelve, he was an awkward loner, overweight and bookish, his only friend being an eccentric uncle – owner of Niagara Falls' Occultorium (purveyor of the mysterious and mystical). When new kid in town Billy Yellowbird enters the shop with a real interest in the occult, Uncle C sees an opportunity to forge a friendship between the two boys and proposes they form The Saturday Night Ghost Club. As the group begins exploring some local legends (including Niagara Falls' real-life Screaming Tunnel), I decided that this is more coming-of-age through facing fears (like Stephen King's The Body) than truly a horror story, but as the book progresses and we learn more about the characters, I eventually realised that this is so much more. From the book's beautiful dustjacket (that looks like a beat-up library edition of a Hardy Boys novel) and the deckle-edge pages that make it a pleasure to hold, to the fluid and compelling prose that had me finishing this story in a few hours, this is easily my favourite of Craig Davidson's books.
That magic gets kicked out of you, churched out, shamed out – or worse, you steal it from yourself. It gets embarrassed out of you by the kids who run the same stretch of streets and grown-ups who say it’s time to put away childish things. By degrees, you kill your own magic. Before long your fears become adult ones: crushing debts and responsibilities, sick parents and sick kids, the possibility of dying unremembered or unloved. Fears of not being the person you were so certain you’d grow up to be.Twelve is such a great age for the main characters – just on the cusp before the magic gets kicked out of them (not to mention Billy's older sister, Dove, and the effects she has on young Jake) – and to have Jake be a neurosurgeon in the present makes for some interesting stories about how the brain works (and the fascinating otherworlds the brain can create when it isn't working right). It's true that Uncle C plans their outings around urban legends and ghost stories, but it was the realistic stories of human evil (the events leading up to the creation of some local ghosts) that really made my skin crawl:
It's like with vampires, boys. Once you invite them over the threshold, you're theirs. The rat-faced man didn't even take his boots off. He walked into the kitchen tracking mud over the floor and basked in the heat from the wood stove. After looking this way and that to make sure nobody else was at home, he took a knife off the cutting board – the woman had been cutting potatoes for dinner – and sawed through the phone cord. It was then, I'm sure, that the couple got an inkling of the hell they'd invited into their home. Rat-face slunk to the sink and softly, with just the tip of the knife, tapped on the window. Tap, tap, tap, tap...little pig, little pig, let me in...This is a coming-of-age story: not only does Jake find self-worth from his friendship with Billy and experience his first crush with Dove, but circumstances eventually eject him from the protective cocoon of childhood and force him to confront the more dangerous realities of the adult world. And by having some of the narrative occur in the present, Jake is able to comment on the nature of memory and story; acknowledge that the most fearsome ghosts might be those that are created by our own minds.
Everything I've told you is true. Every word of it.I enjoyed everything about the Niagara Falls setting, the well-developed characters, and the compelling plotline. I am totally surprised and delighted to have found so much meaning in my bookclub's “lightweight” Halloween read: this book is so much more than that.
But you must know this, too: I want it to be true. Everything in me wants that.
2018 Rogers Writers' Trust Fiction Prize Finalists
- Beirut Hellfire Society by Rawi Hage.
- Dear Evelyn by Kathy Page.
- Land Mammals and Sea Creatures by Jen Neale.
- The Saturday Night Ghost Club by Craig Davidson.
- Washington Black by Esi Edugyen.
*Won by Dear Evelyn
