 Seeing ghosts are only the beginning of David’s problems Steven Hopstaken’s debut Stoker’s Wilde (2019) and sequel Stoker’s Wilde West (2020) were warmly received upon release and his third novel A Man Among Ghosts is a clever change of pace, abandoning the adventurous historical world of Bram Stoker and Oscar Wilde for contemporary America, featuring a seriously weird, haunted house. There are a lot of ghosts featured in A Man Among Ghosts, so many in fact that they fail to have much in the way of a scare factor, even if some are aggressive, unpredictable or dismissive. This is partly because the ghosts have their own agenda and motives, which is integral to the main longer arc of the novel which is revealed nice and slowly. Ultimately this makes A Man Among Ghosts a very unorthodox, haunted house novel, as it does not include many of the usual type of “Boo!” moments or fear factor style atmosphere. However, it is far from predictable and where the plot ends up is a million miles from where it begins, so much so I would avoid spoilers in other reviews. Much is crammed into its 240 unpredictable pages and it was an entertaining read. The novel begins with David buying a dilapidated Victorian house after becoming tired of renting. Working in computer programming, he feels that it is time to settle down and live a more adult lifestyle. However, he is also slightly depressed as his best friend Gary (and girlfriend Shannon) will soon be moving out of the area and he hopes to make new friends but feels his best years might be behind him. Disaster then strikes and a brain tumour diagnosis means he only has three months to live and around this time he starts to see ghosts in his new house. Mentally David finds himself in a very fragile state and calls of his old friend Gary to help, who is a successful magician/illusionist, but does not believe in ghosts and is sure he can prove what Gary is seeing is not real. It is difficult to say much more about A Man Among Ghosts without heading into spoiler territory, but I found myself seriously invested in figuring out what was going on. David makes friends with Gus, his next-door neighbour, and even finds a new girlfriend, but can’t shake off the sense of paranoia that somebody is messing with him, but why? Strangely, many of the characters accepted very easily the fact that David saw ghosts and there are even a couple of exorcisms thrown into the mix courtesy of David’s estranged evangelical Christian father. Even more surprising, he soon learns that some of the spirits he sees are of people who are not yet dead and so somewhat tricky to exorcise! When he sees ghosts (or whatever they are) in locations other than the house things get even wackier. The advance blurbs namechecked the film Jacob’s Ladder, Stephen King’s The Dead Zone and Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House. Comparing it to the all-time Jackson classic is probably overreaching slightly, but I could see snatches of Jacob’s Ladder and more significantly The Dead Zone which the book owes a larger debt to. It must also be said that there was also a very cool (unnamed) cat in this novel which made me smile. Even though the book was built around David I did not find him to be particularly likable, but not did I dislike him and just found him rather bland. It might have been a stronger read if he been a slightly deeper character. A Man Among Ghosts was a solid horror thriller which what it lacked in scares more than made up with a clever, unpredictable, and well developed plot. It was also a very easy to read novel and I had fun speeding through it in no time at all. Tony Jones A Man Among Ghosts |
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