Onyx reviews: The Saturday Night Ghost Club by Craig Davidson

Reviewed by Bev Vincent, 07/14/2019

Coming-of-age stories set in the 1980s have been all the rage since Stephen King's novella "The Body" was released as the movie Stand By Me. Other authors, including Dan Simmons and Robert McCammon, have contributed to the genre, and the recent Netflix series Stranger Things is one of the better cinematic recreations of the era.

The Saturday Night Ghost Club began as Craig Davidson's PhD thesis and, while the story and its environs share a lot with Davidson's youth, he states that this isn't a fictionalized retelling of his childhood. Certainly, Davidson (who also writes under the name Nick Cutter) didn't become a neurosurgeon, as does his young protagonist.

The story is set in the Canadian town of Niagara Falls, a tourist trap on the fringe of that famous site, whose roaring cascade forms an omnipresent background. Jacob "Jake" Baker's father comes from a rough-and-tumble family of Irish brawlers, but his mother tamed him and he is now content to work as a teller and drink nothing stronger than low-alcohol beer. Jake is a loner, gullible, chubby and awkward, a prime target for the town's bullies, including Percy Ellins.

Many things change in Jake's life during the summer of his twelfth year. For one thing, he gets a friend, Billy Yellowbird. For another, he makes the acquaintance of Billy's older sister, Dove, two years his senior and destined to be the kind of girl his mother warns him against. The Yellowbirds have moved to town from Slave Lake and are currently mourning the death of their grandmother. In fact, it is this which first brings Billy to the Occultorium, a curio store run by Jake's uncle, Calvin. Billy wants to communicate with his grandmother's spirit and he believes Calvin—an eccentric conspiracy theorist and devotee of Charles Fort with a literal hotline to the tinfoil-hat squadron—might be able to hook him up.

Calvin leads Billy and Jake on the first of a number of adventures that summer. They break into the local mortuary so Billy can have a final moment with his grandmother. Subsequently, Calvin takes them to different places around town that have reputations for being haunted: an old train tunnel where a ghost will appear if a match is struck at midnight, an oxbow lake where a car remains submerged after a tragic accident, the burned remains of a house that was the site of a home invasion.

One thing that sets this nostalgia story apart from others is the presence of adults. Uncle Calvin is the ringleader, but the man who runs the video emporium next door, Lex Galbraith (who also supplies pot to high school kids and mistakenly goes "all in" on the Betamax video format), also accompanies them. Through his reactions to Calvin's surreptitious adventures, readers first get the idea that there is more to these nocturnal visits than curiosity.

Billy joins the Saturday Night Ghost Club for most of their outings, and Dove comes on some of them as well. Dove is the first girl that Jake comes to appreciate as something different than one of the guys. For her part, Dove is a wild child with emotional issues and a burning desire to leave town. Still, she hangs out with Jake off and on over the course of the summer after coming to his assistance with Percy Ellins.

Billy, Jake and Dove have other adventures, including a harrowing encounter with a stranger in a scrap yard. Of course, an early showdown with a bully all but guarantees a reprise, and by the end of summer, Ellins tries to even the score, with a violent but hilarious outcome. Eventually, Jake confesses to his parents what he's been doing with his uncle and they reveal the true story behind the places Uncle C. took Jake and his friends.

Compared to some of the epic novels in this genre, The Saturday Night Ghost Club is brief, more of a novella than a novel, almost YA in nature. There is little by way of overt violence (other than a bloody punch in the nose) and the ghosts are of the sort anyone who has heard stories at summer camp will have experienced. It owes more to the rich nostalgia of Bradbury's Dandelion Wine than to Summer of Night or Boy's Life.

Ultimately, it's a book about the brain's need to discover the truth and about memory, underscored by the interludes told from the perspective of an adult Jake, who operates on people's brains and is fully aware that a misstep on his part could rob someone of some—or all—of their memories.