“The past is never done with us in any substantial way.”
 Chasing the Dead  |
Chasing the DeadAuthor: Schreiber, Joe |
 Chasing the Dead  |
Chasing the DeadAuthor: Schreiber, Joe |
If you are looking for a ghost story with teeth, look no further. Joe Schreiber’s Chasing the Dead has teeth aplenty, jagged and razor sharp.
I read Chasing the Dead because the librarians and I where I work could not decide if it was a thriller (and therefore belonged in Fiction section), or a mystery or a horror novel (which would place it in those sections respectively). Imagine my surprise when it turned out to contain heaping amounts of all three genres rolled into one story.
Susan Young is a successful woman who is now a single mother. Just days before Christmas, Susan gets home after work before anyone else. Suddenly the phone rings and the man on the other end explains that he has her daughter Veda and her nanny Marilyn. They are okay but whether they remain okay is entirely up to Susan. She must do everything she is instructed or her child dies.
What follows is one unending night filled with panic, pain, torture and death. Susan is forced to retrieve a body and then transport it through the back roads of Massachusetts, through a series of small towns in a particular order, to the final town which she must reach before the night ends. However there are obstacles she must overcome and along the way she finds out the true inhuman nature of Veda’s kidnapper and how it ties into the most horrific incident from her childhood.
And, oh yes, there are ghosts. Throughout the night ghost from her past haunt her in her memories while ghosts in the present inhabit dead bodies of loved ones and chase after her. There is the body that she is forced to bring with her that has begun to change and the ultimate ghost story, one that’s become an urban legend, which ties it all together.
Philip, Susan’s ex-husband, once told her “The past is never done with us in any substantial way.” That proves to be true in Schreiber’s story. The past comes back to haunt Susan in several different ways.
Besides blurring the boundaries of genre, Joe Schreiber plays with the boundaries of reality. There is a blog you might wish to check out: Chasing the Dead: An Investigation of Seven Towns in Massachusetts.
Jeff is a high school math teacher from Palmyra, Pennsylvania with a wife and two sons. The blog really starts on July 8, 2006 which is where you’ll want to begin reading. Jeff takes his family on a trip to East Newberry to investigate the legend of Isaac Hamilton for a book to be published by University of California Press.
I read the novel long before I stumbled across the blog so I’d recommend you read it in that order. But if you find yourself on the fence as to whether this is the book for you, you might try reading this blog and see if it intrigues you.
This story will remind you just why you should be afraid of ghosts at night.
If you like Chasing the Dead, you might try Michael Gruber’s Tropic of Night. Jimmy Paz is a detective who loves his normal life. Unfortunately the case he and his partner catches is anything but normal. The more the supernatural elements imping upon the muder investigation, the more he resists. Like Susan, Jimmy is dragged kicking and screaming until he is face to face with the supernatural.
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