Ghost Eaters. Y’all. When I first finished this book, I had to just wander around my apartment staring at things for a little while, trying to process my thoughts. I was afloat. I, myself, felt like a bit of a ghost. You’ve heard the term “book hangover”? This gave me a major one. I didn’t start my next read after this for a couple of days because I just couldn’t get into it after this.
So, Ghost Eaters starts out by hitting us with a pretty interesting premise. Short version: the main character’s ex-boyfriend has discovered a drug that allows you to see ghosts.
“This is something new and old all at once: a strung out séance, a planchette in a pill.”
Longer version: Erin, in her mid-twenties, is on a date with a “stable, respectable” (albeit boring) type, one of her steps to get her life “on track”, when Silas, her on-again-off-again-ex-boyfriend-current-friend-even-though-they-don’t-talk-much starts blowing up her phone asking her to come spring him from rehab. Erin knows better—of course she does—but she goes anyway. She finds him waiting for her in the rain, completely strung out, and takes him back to her place, where his increasingly bizarre behavior starts to bother her. She’s on the cusp of interviewing for a new job in the field she wants a career in and is trying to “do all the right things”, and she starts thinking that she needs to cut Silas and his addictive, erratic behaviors out of her life to be able to do this. When an ill-planned, homegrown intervention goes awry, she ends up just screaming at him and kicking him out.
And the next day, he turns up dead of an overdose.
I mean, this is just the opening. Hell of a way to start, already, and the journey just gets crazier from there when Erin’s other friend, Tobias (one of the Core Four of their group that has been hanging around each other since freshman year of college), reveals that Silas had been using a new drug called Ghost, which makes the user capable of seeing and communicating with ghosts.
“The dead are always inside us. Think of your mind as a doorway to the other side, but it’s locked and our ghosts can’t get through. We need a key.”
It sounds ludicrous at first, but, wracked with grief and overwhelming guilt about her last interactions with Silas before his death, Erin agrees to try it, hoping to see him one more time and make peace. Find some semblance of closure. But from there, things get out of control—Erin is seeing ghosts everywhere, she can’t get them to leave her alone, and she is sliding down a slippery slope of addiction.
I was invested in this story right from the opening scene, a flashback where the four main friends featured in the story sneak into a cemetery at night and break into a mausoleum. It serves as the perfect way to set the scene and illustrate the dynamics between the members of the group and almost kind of foreshadow some of the ways they’re going to come into play in the rest of the book. It’s obvious from the get-go that Silas is one of those people whose orbit you just can’t get out of, even if you want to. I feel like we all know people like that, so it felt very real and relatable, even as the story goes on and they still can’t get out of his orbit—even after his death.
“They say your life flashes before your eyes right before you die, but all I see is Silas’s.”
I also felt like I could relate to these characters because they all came from what seems to be an academic creative writing program at college, and then went into the “real world” a little unmoored, kind of drifting and trying to find a path and nail something down, and I don’t know, that all just felt very personal. There’s this line about their friend Amara where Erin says, “She fantasizes about interviewing obscure bands for the Village Voice, penning essays for The Paris Review, living that good ol’ Didion existence.” I just had to cackle at this. It’s the kind of sardonic joke that found exactly its target audience.
So from the get-go here I am pretty invested in these characters, and then their journey gets so wild. It’s absolutely heartbreaking, because the portrayal of how Erin and some other characters get involved with Ghost and then get addicted to it even though it’s bringing terrible things into her life is a really accurate representation of the dangerous downward spiral of addiction. It’s very raw and at times, difficult to read, because it’s so well-written. Even the depiction of how the characters feel under the influence of Ghost was captivating, taking possession from being written as a painful experience or a battle against evil to an intimate experience, something euphoric—much like the experience of taking certain drugs.
You feel helpless as you’re watching things just fall apart for her and watching her try to dig herself out and just keep getting sucked back down like she’s battling quicksand. Between the portrayals of grief and drug addiction, Clay McLeod Chapman really takes the concepts of “ghosts” to the next level. Yes, there are ghosts in the book, people who have died and are now trapped on this plane of existence, but there are also ghosts—these characters are haunted. They are haunted by their grief, their loss, their pain, their struggle to address the worst parts of their lives. They’re haunted by their choices. It leaves you closing the book thinking to yourself, don’t we all have these ghosts? Aren’t we all haunted? It makes it easy to see how they got themselves into this situation.
Along the way, though, there are some twists as we start to learn more about both Ghost the drug and the ghosts that are haunting the characters, and Silas’s involvement with Ghost before he died, as well as Tobias’s current involvement. There are some things that will keep you wondering and guessing—one particular thing that I kept writing predictions for in the margins and wanted to jump through the pages and yell it at Erin so she would see. She was too far gon to put the pieces together, but I wasn’t, and I wanted to help her so badly! As you read, the answers will be sprung upon you in really horrific ways.
It also has kind of a mushroom tie-in, which is awesome, because as you know, I love mushrooms, and—and I never thought I’d find myself writing this sentence—mushrooms are having a major moment right now.
So, this book has a lot of elements: grief, addiction, loss, guilt, literal ghosts, metaphorical ghosts, relatable main characters, mushrooms. But it all comes together to create a really well-written and great horror novel that I highly recommend. I could go on. I could go on and on, but I won’t, especially as I don’t want to risk spoiling anything for anyone who hasn’t read it yet, and trust me when I tell you, you will want to read it.
This is, surprisingly, my first Clay McLeod Chapman book, so thank you very much to Quirk Books to sending me an advance reading copy. I have a feeling this will not be my last book by this author, because now that I’ve discovered that I really like his voice and writing style, I’ll definitely be checking out his other publications—and any future books he puts out.
Ghost Eaters releases from Quirk Books on September 20th, which is right around the corner, so make sure to grab yourself a copy, and then if you want to talk about it, let me know! I would love to discuss and hear what y’all think.