The Saturday Night Ghost Club

Book excerpt: A short, infectious, and bittersweet coming-of-age story in the vein of Stranger Things and Stand by Me about a group of misfit kids who spend an unforgettable summer investigating local ghost stories and urban legends. Finalist for the Rogers Writers' Trust Fiction Prize. When neurosurgeon Jake Baker operates, he knows he's handling more than a patient's delicate brain tissue--he's altering the seat of consciousness, the golden vault of memory. And memory, Jake knows well, can be a tricky, quicksilver thing. When growing up in 1980s Niagara Falls, a.k.a. Cataract City--a seedy but magical, slightly haunted place--one of Jake's closest confidantes was his uncle Calvin, a sweet but eccentric misfit enamored of occult artefacts and outlandish conspiracy theories. The summer Jake turned twelve, Calvin invited him to join the "Saturday Night Ghost Club"--a seemingly light-hearted project to investigate some of Cataract City's more macabre urban myths. Over the course of that life-altering summer, Jake not only met his lifelong best friend and began to imagine his own future, he came to realize that his uncle's preoccupation with chilling legends sprang from something so painful, and buried so deep, that Calvin himself was unaware of the source. From the Scotiabank Giller Prize-nominated author of Cataract City and bestselling memoir Precious Cargo, here is a note-perfect novel that poignantly examines the fragility of mind and body, the resilience of the human spirit--and the haunting mutability of memory.