The Ghost That Ate Us
by Daniel Kraus
Raw Dog Screaming Press, 2022
302 pages
ADULT
Kraus frames his latest horror story in the relevant format of a true crime investigator’s report. As a slice-of-life statement revealed through the context of a poltergeist manifestation, he poignantly captures the lives of an entire cross-section of America, encompassing feelings about the 2020 election and the ensuing COVID-19 pandemic, masks, tests, distancing, and all.
The book begins as an interesting study of event phenomena & the people surrounding a historic tragedy of deadly proportion through interviews and footage description. With subtle social commentary that touches on topics like pay scale, high school graduating teens, and finding meaning in life while a series of supernatural events unfolds, the interviews create an all-too-real ethnography of burger joint employees in middle America.
At first the presentation feels like too many details to remember, but it provides a good feel for the characters and the circumstances that built up to the actual occurrence, the Burger City Tragedy, the details of which the author holds back until the end.
Narrated by the character of Daniel Kraus, cult horror author, his interviews fictitiously break the fourth wall and we go along for the ride as he drills down into the lives of the Burger City time sheet’s roster of names:
Amber & Darcy Smyrna, a mother and daughter team devastated by a brain tumor,
Amy Mold, activist,
Mickey McCormick, middle-aged hipster who dies his hair to look like a rock star,
Yesnia Ruiz, a young employee who chooses to date the much older Mickey,
Bob Nutting, the franchise manager who disappears into his own insanity when the really weird stuff hits the fan,
Quindlen Arthur, nerdy A-V friend and straight-man to:
Clemens Dumay, high school senior destined to stay a townie,
Tamra Longmoor, a devout Christian who does her part to protect the restaurant from evil,
Cheri Oritt, the mother hen. (Every fast-food joint has one,)
Dez Mozley, the night cleaner and only one who can fix the Freezie machine, who also imagines herself a witch queen,
Kit Bryant, another townie, a smart kid with a golden heart and a notebook marked “IDEAS,”
Dion Skerry, the 330 pound, no-personality assistant manager who takes over in Nutting’s absence,
Javier Villareal, with not much backstory,
Zane Shakespeare, a mid-40s health enthusiast who almost makes it but not quite.
We feel like participants as events unfold: a jumping standee sign, a crazed paper towel dispenser, burgers that move across the grill of their own volition, then amp up to a cold spot inside the industrial freezer and a death in the bathroom. And it all began with the on site murder of a meth addict named Ash Muckels.
Kraus backs up his story with serious, detailed research in each chapter. Not just ghost-hunting technology like PKE meters and sub-sonics, but social media engineering such as it was in 2020, from kik to Web PageRank. (We know what rabbit-holes the author was falling into when he should have been writing!) At one point, he uses the term “scooby doo-ed their heads around the corner,“ and, like all Gen X’ers, I understood completely. Reading Kraus is a blast. He pokes fun at the plethora of ghost hunting television shows currently on channels that used to boast science and history documentaries as a duo of paranormal researchers become the catalyst of the downfall. A group of people who want nothing more than some attention and excitement, a small 15 minutes of limelight in the middle of a working class wasteland, as a manifestation in nowheresville makes things interesting.
Each chapter pulls you along wanting the next, but as you meet the people devastated by the poltergeist manifestation, a kind of what Sartre called nausea (or meat-sickness, if you will,) -purposely- begins to permeate the narrative.
As we jump back and forth through time, we feel the excitement of a real life ghost, then we watch all the players as they begin to break down mentally while also disintegrating physically; losing weight along with their will to cope. It’s all happening at once for us. The survivors of the Burger City Tragedy are all now covered in scars shaped like bite marks as if they were symbolically chewed up by the system that ensconces the meat.
At the 2/3 mark of the story, the descent into madness begins with Dez, the cleaning person who is also a knowledgeable witch, as it turns out, stabbing her hand to paint a ward, a sigil smeared in blood on the freezer door.
Was the tragedy really caused by psychokinetic energy like Quin proposed? Like Kit believed himself guilty of? By someone else? Or was there really something in the basement raised by warlocks?
The account is long. The buildup is slow, so when the climactic event finally shows up, I’ve been ready. I think the author could have cut three or four chapters and delivered more of a punch, because it’s the same mild manifestations being encountered, then being rehashed through Kit’s phone camera.
Yet I also have to draw attention to Kraus’ timeline artistry here. The framing interviews occur in the present, but the story and the characterization, all unfold perfectly like a bridge of playing cards so each scene gives you another step towards the endpoint, reveals another layer of tapestry that has built a clear path to the explosion of supernatural insanity at the end.
And the end is fulfilling. It might have been left vague, maybe should have been. But then the author goes back, he catches onto one last clue that gives real insight on the manifestation and twists the ending effectively so it’s just that much more nightmarish.
The story is an examination of the human condition, the American condition. Here, something big happens to offer people a piece of what they’ve always dreamed of: a sense of meaning, of belonging, of worth… and then it’s torn away in a one-two punch, first in a devastating disappointment, an angst that breaks the employees first emotionally, then in a storm of violence.
