The Saturday Night Ghost Club
by Craig Davidson
Penguin Books, 2019
224 pages
Young Adult (14+)
This is a ghost story, but not a scary paranormal fright-fest. It’s about the ghosts of the past.
Outcast Jake meets Billy Yellowbird at his Uncle’s tourist-trap crystals and magic shop, “The Occultorium.” Soon after he realizes Billy’s sister Dove is the stranger who saved him from a whooping from some bullies. She’s an energetic firecracker beset with wanderlust, desperately seeking excitement in the backwoods town her low-income parents landed her in. Except it’s not a small town, it’s Niagara Falls. Just… not the tourist destination we all think of, it’s the back-side world of the townies, the year long residents.
Smitten, Jake takes his Uncle Calvin up on his offer to explore some haunted locations on Saturday night, inviting Billy and Dove. The story is written with amazingly rich prose; three friends exploring the mysteries of a small town guided by a boy’s quirky uncle, encountering ghosts and the geography of local legends.
Each section of the novella is prefaced with an anecdote told by a brain surgeon, little slices of life that, oddly, didn’t seem to have any connection to the following chapters.
The kids keep it all a secret, their crazy uncle chaperoned by his friend who runs the video rental place next to the Occultorium, though they have a few close calls. They have a run in with a murderous drifter in a big junkyard, recalling the horror and coming-of-age movies of the 80’s.
By the mid-point, I had pretty well figured out that all the haunted scenes the Saturday Night Ghost Club had visited had something to do with Uncle Calvin. (Well, Davidson purposely foreshadowed it,) but then the author made me suffer through Calvin’s painful, sad descent into madness, blow for blow, stripping the book of any supernatural flavor it had.
If you are looking for Stranger Things, this misses the mark, but it is a nostalgic look back to the ‘80s when you could take off on your bike in the middle of the night and fall in love with the new girl who rides a skateboard and beats up bullies.
