THE GHOST THAT ATE US: THE TRAGIC TRUE STORY OF THE BURGER CITY POLTERGEIST BY DANIEL KRAUS

5/7/2022

True crime, poltergeists and burgers are a strange mix

Daniel Kraus should be applauded for trying something wildly different with The Ghost That Ate Us: The Tragic True Story of the Burger City Poltergeist, which I tried my best to like, but ultimately found frustrating. Kraus has a fascinating back-catalogue and is a genuine master of YA fiction, with Rotters (2011) and the awesome Bent Heavens (2020) two of my personal favourites. The Middle Grade Trollhunters (2015) is also highly recommended, as is They Threw Us Away (2020) which is aimed at slightly younger kids and starts off an ongoing trilogy.

In 2019 he picked over the bones of George A Romero’s zombie legacy with the doorstopper The Living Dead, which although got some great reviews I found hard work. There are very few writers out there with the capability to produce this impressive range of fiction (it’s immaterial whether I dig it or not) and The Ghost That Ate Us is a wacky addition to a highly impressive literary CV. Apart from Neil Gaiman only a handful of authors write for adults, through YA all the way down to Middle Grade.

This latest novel presents itself as a blend of non-fiction or true crime and the endless footnotes failed to convince and I quickly became bored by the goings on surrounding a so-called poltergeist haunting in a fast-food restaurant. The reader is repeatedly given dull and irrelevant facts, here is an example from page 213: “’Cage-free’ and ‘humane meat’ are empty, undefined phases used to pat the heads of queasy carnivores. Each day, 25 million chickens, 4 million pigs, and 800,000 cows are slaughtered.” The book is full of this type of information dropping, none of which added anything in making the book sound authentically non-fiction or realistic, if anything stunted the flow of the plot. It was not convincingly assimilated into the action and I struggled to maintain interest when such statistics were repeatedly fed to the reader and failed to connect with the plot.

The Ghost That Ate Us is written in such a way that the reader is to assume that Daniel Kraus is also the author of the non-fiction account we are reading. However, his personality, motivations or anything else are completely neutral and non-descript. How would I describe his ‘voice’? I couldn’t, as he barely has one. On a couple of occasions, he mentions his other fiction and there is a funny scene where another character has read Rotters, otherwise the voice is as bland as white paint.

Many other authors have dropped themselves in their work, including Stephen King, Bret Easton Ellis, Clive Cussler, Douglas Coupland, Darren Shan and HP Lovecraft to name a few. So, this is nothing new, but it is a pity Daniel Kraus did not make a more convincing job of bringing his personal narrative to life. In contrast, when I read Richard Chizmar’s Chasing the Boogieman I felt I learned a lot about Richard and his personality, this does not happen in The Ghost That Ate Us at all. Chizmar also brought the nostalgia connected to his childhood hometown to life, in contrast the restaurant location Kraus describes is completely lacking character and atmosphere.

The story itself is built around the events of June 1st (2017) where six people were killed at a Burger City franchise off I-80 near Jonny, Iowa, a story which made national headlines. This followed nine months of alleged paranormal activity at the fast-food joint-events popularly known as "the Burger City Poltergeist." Daniel Kraus investigates the events by interviewing those involved, digging into their histories and other aspects of working in the restaurant, including relationships, possible motivations for hoaxes or other non-supernatural avenues of research. All of this had the potential for a good story, but it seemed to be lost in a dull hodgepodge of comments, dull/repetitive characters interviews, irrelevant details and for a book with “poltergeist” in the title, nothing about it convinced.

Most of the humour also misfired and ultimately the final product was a mixed-up mess that just became more and more frustrating as things moved on. I kept on thinking I had missed something, hoping things would pick up, but it never did. Horror laced with comedy is not easy to pull off and although it was an original idea, it was let down by poor execution and in reality it was obviously very difficult to present supposedly true events set in a burger joint sound interesting.

Trying to emulate true crime, especially when attempting to use comedy and potential supernatural events, is not easy and although The Ghost That Ate Us tries its best and I became lost in the bland characters, boring detail and ultimately did not care whether the poltergeist was real or not. John Darnielle was more successful with the recent Devil House (without the comedy) blending fiction with the real-life murder which inspired the eighties hit film River’s Edge showing there is more than one way to skin a cat. Daniel Kraus is a great writer, is totally amazing for kids and teens, and nobody can fault him for trying something a little bit different.

Tony Jones

The Ghost That Ate Us: The Tragic True Story of the Burger City Poltergeist
by Daniel Kraus

You remember the brutal crime, don't you?

Maybe you read about it on Twitter. Maybe a friend sent you a news clip. Maybe you saw it on an episode of Spectral Journeys that night you were flipping through channels, unable to sleep. On June 1, 2017, six people were killed at a Burger City franchise off I-80 near Jonny, Iowa. It was the bizarre and gruesome conclusion to nine months of alleged paranormal activity at the fast-food joint-events popularly known as "the Burger City Poltergeist."

The story inspired Facebook memes, Twitter hashtags, Buzzfeed listicles, Saturday Night Live sketches, and more. But the case was never much more than a punchline...until bestselling writer Daniel Kraus (The Shape of Water, The Living Dead) decided to head to Iowa to dig up what really happened.

Presented here is the definitive story of "the most exhaustively documented haunting in history," including-for the first time ever-interviews with every living survivor of the tragedy. The employees of Burger City were a family. They loved one another. At least, at the beginning.