Ghost Eaters by Clay McLeod Chapman

I would like to thank Quirk Books for an advance copy of this novel in exchange for a fair and honest review

Publisher - Quirk Books

Published - Out Now

Price - £17.99 hardback £10.44 Kindle eBook

Erin hasn’t been able to set a single boundary with her charismatic but reckless college ex-boyfriend, Silas. When he asks her to bail him out of rehab―again―she knows she needs to cut him off. But days after he gets out, Silas turns up dead of an overdose in their hometown of Richmond, Virginia, and Erin’s world falls apart.

Then a friend tells her about Ghost, a new drug that allows users to see the dead. Wanna get haunted? he asks. Grieving and desperate for closure with Silas, Erin agrees to a pill-popping “séance.” But the drug has unfathomable side effects―and once you take it, you can never go back.

Friendships are a key part of our life. The people we let into our lives; trust with our hopes and fears and help make life fun….most of the time. Sometimes we allow a friend into our lives who is a lot more problematic - they can offer fun and excitement but also can be a drain on our joy as we end up sharing their baggage and constant demands. In Clay McLeod Chapman’s eerie horror novel Ghost Eaters there is a fantastic exploration of toxic friendship; the power of addiction and our fears what may lurk awaiting us after death.

Erin is a young woman facing post-College life in the US city of Richmond and facing a crossroads between giving up dreams of being a writer; embracing office work and a future in marketing and her once close quartet of friends starting to fracture and at the heart of that the magnetic yet chaotic Silas who has been Erin’s on off boyfriend and best friend but increasingly he seems lost in drug taking and hopping in and out of recovery. An attempt after his last escape to attempt an intervention leads the very erratic Silas to disappear and be found dead. Erin is overwhelmed with guilt at her failure to get through to Silas and then she is told there is a drug named Ghost that as well as getting you high could also just possibly help you meet spirits from the other side. Erin finds this drug irresistible but she also discovers it has an attraction for undead spirits drawn to users and in a city like Richmond there are many many places where the dead may be lurking.

This is a very compelling tale where Chapman has a brilliant hook of how a toxic friendship is itself an addiction. Erin knows consistently Silas is a mix of control freak; bully; snob and also someone who gives Erin and friends joy, love and a desire in them to please him. Erin can’t let go and the one time she has is when Silas dies of an overdose. Told throughout in first person we get to see how Silas is pretty much always in her mind and his death shatters her. Guilt, grief and loss all at the same time as she feels her life slowly subside into bad dates, boring jobs an an uncaring family. We understand why in such a life Silas offers her a chance of escape and excitement which is now gone. Chapman’s writing of these initial sections is very powerful and never judging. We understand how this situation has evolved. And then for extra terror we add ghosts into the story.

The idea that one of Erin’s friends has is for the three remaining friends to gather; take a mysterious new drug named Ghost and hold a seance to try and contact Silas. Only Erin though seems to sense anything. The drug also gives Erin a high she really craves more and more. At this point the story moves into a really unusual direction which is utterly compelling. Erin realised this drug is now making her see ALL the ghosts of Richmond and more disturbingly all the ghosts see her and find the taste of this drug irresistible. Chapman smartly makes us feel Erin’s puzzlement and then shock at what this drug does to her. We get increasingly nightmarish encounters and reminders this centuries old city has seen a huge amount of violent death and disaster and worst of all they want to taste the Ghost drug that lives in Erin. It’s absolutely gripping but also highlights the shock we realise that despite all these horrific things that happen to her; that make her start to lose friends, family and increasingly be seen as unreliable and strange; despite all of that Erin still wants to take more Ghost.

The final sections of the book explore the horror of addiction. Erin submits to more and more Ghost; the idea of finally getting close to Silas and the highs that this drug gives her makes her become lost in a claustrophobic world constant drug taking and encounters with the dead of the city. There are strange hypnotic scenes that are redolent of something that cross into Trainspotting territory and I bet literary critics would just say it’s all in Erin’s mind but I’m a genre fan so of course for me it’s all real! This is both a story of someone’s self destruction but as we find there are other forces at work using Erin and have far bigger plans for the use of Ghost. Usually in horror it’s about the monster getting the victim here the victim themselves welcomes the monster into their lives and I think this makes it one of the most unsettling horror tales I’ve read in a long time. One toxic friend can easily destroy an entire set of lives but our own responsibility on when to end things is also under the spotlight. Is Erin victim or instigator of her own potential destruction? The story leaves us to decide for ourselves but the finale leaves things uncomfortably open ended as to how this will finally end.

Ghost Eaters is an imaginative, eerie and on occasion gruesome horror filled with dark surprises and a nightmarish exploration of addiction. This gives it a fresh edge for me in a horror tale but will take the reader into some very dark places of death, grief and drug abuse and then adds the supernatural on top to chilling effect. I could not let it go once I started it and highly recommend this to anyone seeking a terrifying read this spooky season.