New Arrival: Ghost Eaters by Clay Mcleod Chapman

 Ghosts have haunted everywhere from spooky, gothic houses to IKEA-like stores and fast food restaurants, but where these restless spirits ultimately reside is in the human mind. The people who encounter these insubstantial spirits also bring along their own substantial baggage, whether it be fears, skepticism, or one of the most powerful and painful aspects of the human condition: grief. Fewer still are the people who actively expose themselves to the potential physical and mental trauma of a haunting, but that’s exactly what the people in Clay Mcleod Chapman’s Ghost Eaters do in their quest to “get haunted.”

Erin chooses to get haunted because she just lost her on-again, off-again boyfriend and would do anything to get answers. She discovers those answers in Ghost, a drug that allows its users to see ghosts. Soon, this drug is spreading beyond the borders of their home city of Williamsburg, but Erin has her own problems. As she becomes more and more addicted to Ghost, eager to finally make contact with her boyfriend, Erin soon finds herself in a spiritual hole from which she might be unable to free herself.

While there are many stories that tackle the attachment ghosts have to the living from the spirit’s perspective, a sort of magic bullet that sends the ghost “into the light,” it is rare that a story looks at how the living attract ghosts. The fact that this drug not only lets people see ghosts but draws ghosts toward them is perhaps the greatest metaphor for how one’s inability to move on from a loved one’s death is keeping them haunted. As Erin goes deeper and deeper into her use of Ghost, isolating herself more and more from the living, Chapman reveals a more surreal universe than what is hinted at during the beginning of the story. More than just a run-of-the-mill ghost story, Ghost Eaters is a meditation on grief and how it can pull us away from the living if we’re not careful, that we should “get haunted” at our own risk.

Have You Read This? The Ghost That Ate Us by Daniel Kraus

 There could be a few of them insinuating themselves into your Netflix queue. Maybe they are podcasts that slither through your earbuds into your ear while cleaning. You might even be reading one right now. I am speaking, of course, of the true crime genre. Not only is it horror-adjacent, but within the genre, there are all sorts of different crimes out there to tickle one’s bloodlust, from straight-up murder to bizarre forays into the criminal lifestyle. The genre has become so well-known that author Daniel Kraus has decided to use it as a framework in his haunted-fast-food-franchise story The Ghost That Ate Us.

This book chronicles the haunting of a Burger City just outside of Jonny, Iowa. Novelist and first-time true crime writer Daniel Kraus investigates just what happened to the workers who witnessed these strange hauntings and the event that left many of them dead. Going back through digital evidence and interviewing the survivors, Daniel might be the only one able to discover what led to the tragedy that will forever stain Jonny, Iowa and one fast food franchise. More importantly, he might be the only one to stop history from repeating.

Kraus’s story benefits greatly from the true crime format: it allows him to dig into the story in a seemingly clinical manner while that clinical detachment gets chiseled down throughout the course of the story. Add with that his spellbinding interactions with the survivors who are still bearing the physical and emotional scars from the poltergeist and both author and reader are slowly and inevitably pulled in. Much like the Blair Witch back in the ‘90s, its pull comes from its flirtation with being a “true” story. Part of true crime’s appeal is that there is often more than a few kernels of truth in these stories, which makes it a little harder to forget once the book is closed or you’ve closed your Netflix app. Those won’t stop the evil if there’s the possibility it’s somewhere outside your house.

Graphic Content: Sacred Lamb by Tim Seely and Jelena Ðordevic-Maksimovic

Ever since the final girl trope was born in the slashers of the 70’s and 80’s, critics have tried to understand its impact. Its steady evolution from victim to vanquisher, from scream queen to badass heroine, shows that horror, like any genre that lasts through the decades, can evolve. Women might still be stalked through their own horror movie scenario, but now they are at least self-aware enough to make smart decisions and even fight back against their attackers. Such are the final girls who live in and are trapped by Sacred Lamb (also, it’s a trade paperback by writer Tim Seely and illustrator Jelena Ðordevic-Maksimovic).

 

Sacred Lamb is the place social media influencer Kellyn West finds herself after killing her stalker. She is sent to Sacred Lambs, a sort of Final Girl witness protection program, in case her stalker is the kind of killer that repeatedly rises from the dead and refuses to stop adding to their body count. Kelly and the other women at Sacred Lambs are told they are being kept within Sacred Lamb’s walls for their own good. Then, it appears that a horde of killers are indeed rising from the grave, and Sacred Lamb may soon become a slaughterhouse.

There are a lot of stories featuring final girls, and even ones where final girls push back against the trope. Seely’s story, however, is the most obvious metaphor for this trope, where women are literally being imprisoned and being told that it’s to protect them and everyone around them. However, the story can be hard to follow since the women, especially as they are drawn by Ðordevic-Maksimovic, feel interchangeable. But this isn’t necessarily a deep-thinking comic; Ðordevic-Maksimovic’s art might not offer similar faces, but it also has a grittiness that lends itself to the story, one soaked in blood and with a few sharp edges, particularly a sheriff’s armchair psychoanalytic analysis of the killers and victims in his midst. This book isn’t slasher perfection, but it’s good for those intellectual horror nerds who don’t mind an occasional, decadent descent into slasher nostalgia.