Book Review: "The Saturday Night Ghost Club" by Craig Davidson

There's a tremendous sense of nostalgia that pervades every page of Craig Davidson's The Saturday Night Ghost Club. Not only does the book take place in the 1980s, but the storytelling seems to hearken back to a simpler time, when we were far less aware of the horrors that could take place in our very own communities, horrors which didn't involve monsters or ghosts or creatures from another dimension.

"Looking back, I am struck by how precious little it takes to convince an unwilling outsider and the new kid in town to agree to any plan, even one that involved following a gangly middle-aged man into haunted territories."

Jake Baker grew up in Niagara Falls in the 1980s. The town, which came alive in the summer thanks to tourism but was fairly deserted in the winter, was one of those places where not much happened, where people had to live to pursue a better life, and everything—and nearly everyone—had seen better days. A loner who was often bullied by his peers, Jake spent a lot of time with his uncle Calvin, a kind but somewhat goofy and eccentric man who owned a shop in town specializing in the occult and the mysteries of the beyond.

It was Uncle Calvin who helped Jake wrangle the monsters hiding in his closet, let him watch scary movies (at least until his parents found out), educated him on the existence of ghosts and other shadowy creatures, and taught him that there were mysteries in this world that didn't have easy answers. The summer Jake was 12 years old, he became friends with Billy, the new boy in town, and Dove, his erratic, mesmerizing older sister, and Calvin welcomed all of them into "The Saturday Night Ghost Club," a group determined to look into some of the more mysterious stories of their town.

But the more they start looking into these mysteries, the more Jake becomes confused by Calvin's behavior and his lengthy disappearances. He learns what it is like to have a friend you can depend on, and he is drawn to Dove and her brave yet uneven mood swings and actions. And then Jake learns that behind many mysteries there are real truths, truths we may not be ready to bear the burden of knowing, yet we must all the same.

"The brain is the seat of memory, and memory is a tricky thing. At base level, memories are stories—and sometimes those stories we tell allow us to carry on. Sometimes stories are the best we can hope for. They help us to simply get by, while deeper levels of our consciousness slip bandages on the wounds that hold the power to wreck us. So we tell ourselves that the people we love closed their eyes and slipped painlessly away from us. That our personal failures are the product of external forces rather than unfixable weaknesses....Tell yourself these stories long enough and you will discover they have a magical way of becoming facts."

Although The Saturday Night Ghost Club delves briefly into matters of the occult, ghost stories, and the like, at its heart, this is a coming-of-age book about a boy who learns perhaps earlier than he needs to about the horrors that both defy explanation but are, at the same time, very real. This is a book about the bonds of friendship, about understanding fellow misfits, and how people who are truly good at heart may have their own battles to fight.

I thought the book started a bit slowly but once it shifted away from the ghost stories and the occult and focused on relationships and the real stories, it grabbed my heart completely. Davidson did a terrific job telling this story and it felt very true to its time and place, yet at the same time when the chapters shifted to look into the future, those felt very real as well.

While the book is compared to Stranger Things and Stand By Me, I would only make that comparison in terms of their stories about friendship. And while reading The Saturday Night Ghost Club, I was reminded of my favorite quote from Stand By Me: "I never had any friends later on like the ones I had when I was 12. Jesus, does anyone?"