the saturday night ghost club by craig davidson

Sometimes stories are the best we can hope for. Now a successful brain surgeon, Jake is fully aware that “memory is a tricky thing….memories are stories – and sometimes these stories we tell allow us to carry on. Jake recounts this summer from the vantage point of adulthood. When Billy shows up at Uncle Calvin’s occult shop looking for a way to contact his dead grandmother, the boys form a fast friendship.

That’s when he meets Dove and Billy Yellowbird. The novel takes place the summer Jake turns 12. Percy isn’t Jake’s only tormentor, but he is the kid who is, perhaps because they were once friends, relentlessly cruel. He lives with his parents, spends a lot of time with his mother’s brother, Uncle Calvin, and tries to stay out of the way of the town bully, Percy Elkins. It’s a coming-of-age tale reminiscent of Stephen King – which is a compliment. This book, The Saturday Night Ghost Club, is not icky at all.

That book was super icky, but also really good. I have read Davidson’s horror novel The Troop, though, which he wrote using the pseudonym Nick Cutter. The ghosts haunting 1980s Niagara Falls (and man, did I love this novel’s setting – from the actual seedy city itself to the allusions to super specific Canadian touchstones like The Beachcombers) are personal.ĭavidson is probably best known for his 2013 Giller Prize nominated novel Cataract City, but I have never read that book. The ghosts in Craig Davidson’s novel The Saturday Night Ghost Club are not literal ghosts.

The saturday night ghost club by craig davidson