The Monthly Read

• By Mary Drake

Move Over Casper!

A Review of The Saturday Night Ghost Club by Craig Davidson

Some might be put off by the title, as well as the cover, of The Saturday Night Ghost Club. Besides the slightly juvenile looking cover, there’s the element of the supernatural. A specter, phantom, or spirit by any other name is still a ghost, and the term conjures up images of Casper or the cartoonish characters hunted by Bill Murray and Dan Ackroyd. It’s a topic that inspires strong opinions and sometimes an eye roll and/or a derisive smirk.

But the outside of Craig Davidson’s most recent (2018) novel belies the depth within. 

The rule of thumb within the book world is that a novel is intended for an audience which is the same age as the protagonist, and Jake Baker of this novel is twelve years old. It’s touted as a coming of age novel, but it is so much more than that. What does “coming of age” mean, anyway? It means that a young person is initiated into the adult world, with all its attendant problems, conflicts, responsibilities, and pain. It means, as Jake says near the end of the book, that as adults “we all end up a bit broken—a collection of small hurts, hairline cracks in the foundation,” which doesn’t make growing up sound too great. But hey, what choice do you have? Usually there are also some benefits that may compensate, like greater understanding and control of one’s life.

The chapters begin with the adult Jake discussing his life as a neurosurgeon. Somewhat of a surprise since the rest of each chapter concerns Jake’s twelve-year-old self and makes this later success seem far from certain. Jake is chubby, introverted, and fearful; he’s the proverbial kid with a target on his back. Others ignore, ridicule, or torment him, like his one-time friend Percy Elkins who, at the start of the novel, throws a firecracker into Jake’s face, temporarily blinding and deafening him. Who knew that boys were so callous and violent?

But Jake is fortunate to have a loving family, and his best buddy is his eccentric Uncle C. When Jake is seven, Uncle C is the only one who not only believes there is a monster living in Jake’s closet but can also identify it by shape and knows what it eats—“hairy, slimy blobs with uncanny stretching capacities,” he tells Jake, are usually Slurper Slugs, and “Most are harmless, even good-tempered, if they have enough dust bunnies and cobwebs to eat.”  Jake spends a lot of his time at Uncle C’s unusual shop, The Occultorium, which sells all manner of arcana, from dowsing rods to tarot decks, amulets to all-seeing eyes, but his most mysterious item is the “spirit phone,” which “opens a connection” to those who have passed into “the long dark.” 

The idea of starting the Saturday night ghost club is Uncle C’s, and he takes Jake and his new friend Billy to places all over the city of Niagara Falls which are supposed to be haunted by people who have died there. But what begins as a lark quickly takes a darker turn. Jake, cursed or blessed depending on how you look at it with an overactive imagination, embarrasses himself during the first field trip by fainting in “The Screaming Tunnel.” But as the group meets in one location after another, Uncle C’s description of what happened in each place becomes increasingly detailed and disturbing. At the sight of “The Sunken Wreck,” how did he know what the man was thinking who drove his car off a bridge and consigned his wife and unborn child to a watery death? Even more upsetting, even to himself, is Uncle C’s seemingly intimate knowledge of the horrors that occurred at “The House on the Hill.” Soon everyone in the club recognizes that bad things sometimes happen to good people. But these descriptions of evil are not gratuitous, intended merely for shock value. We may not be able to make sense out of suffering, but we can learn from it. And Jake does.

He learns that grief and loss can crush a person “into a shape unrecognizable to his prior self.” But he also learns that even though you may try to hide sorrow from yourself, the brain is “a truth-seeking organ” and even if “you bury those secrets so deep that you forget they ever happened . . . . the truth is a bloodhound. . . .The truth is that abandoned dog following you over sea and land, baying from barren clifftops, never tiring and never quitting, forever pining after you—and the day will come when that dog is on your porch, scratching insistently at your door, forcing you to claim it once again.” 

He learns that the brain which houses our memories is a storyteller and that those stories often help shield us from the injustices of life. As a neurosurgeon he learns that the brain can turn feral, unexpectedly developing tumors in an eight-year-old girl that can change her living world into a sleeping one. He learns that brain tumors can change someone’s personality, even for the better. And when Jake becomes a parent, he recognizes that he “won’t always be able to protect” his son “from the things that can really hurt”—illness, accidents, evil, even heredity.

As he learns and grows up, Jake falls in love with a girl for the first time and develops the nerve to stand up for himself before his nemesis Percy Elkins, who ends up with a permanent bump on his broken nose.

It’s not necessary to believe or be interested in ghosts to enjoy this book, especially since the term “ghost” is loosely used to mean memories that are haunting and persistent. But you will enjoy this book more if you’re curious about human nature, and about the brain in particular. Davidson’s style is thoughtful, reflective, and figurative, and it’s a wonder he can write so convincingly about being a brain surgeon when he’s a novelist. 

Although the narrative jumps around in time, it’s never hard to follow. However, it’s not completely clear how all of the ghosts relate back to the storyline, and, like many novels, the narrative seems to lose some of its momentum in the middle, although the suspense is enough to keep you reading.

Davidson is a Canadian writer who is no stranger to horror, having written many thrillers under the pseudonyms Patrick Lestewka and Nick Cutter. Some of his award winning short stories in the 2005 collection Rust and Bone have been made into plays and movies, and The Saturday Night Ghost Club has also been critically recognized. It’s a good read that is also enlightening and thoughtful, and well worth your time.