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.
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