Ghost Eaters is a novel I finished at the beginning of 2024 and I thought it was worth writing about because it was a unique take on the ghost story genre with a great twist at the end. It isn’t your typical ghost story in that it may have you rethinking your definition of what a ghost really is.
I won’t get into too much detail here at the beginning as I don’t want to spoil the story for anyone. I will, however, post the book description as copied from Amazon so that you can get a feel for what the story is about:
Erin hasn’t been able to set a single boundary with her charismatic but reckless college ex-boyfriend, Silas. When he asks her to bail him out of rehab—again—she knows she needs to cut him off. But days after he gets out, Silas turns up dead of an overdose in their hometown of Richmond, Virginia, and Erin’s world falls apart.
Amazon.com
Then a friend tells her about Ghost, a new drug that allows users to see the dead. Wanna get haunted? he asks. Grieving and desperate for closure with Silas, Erin agrees to a pill-popping “séance.” But the drug has unfathomable side effects—and once you take it, you can never go back.
This is where things start to get a little hairy for those of you who haven’t read the book yet. There are spoilers below, so if you haven’t read it, don’t continue. Now that that is clear, let’s get to the good stuff.
What I Liked About It
There are a number of things I liked about the story, but the following is what really stuck with me.
The Writing and The Pace
I feel like the importance of the style of writing as well as the pace of the story’s plot development is woefully underestimated by most readers. They may not consciously think about it, but they certainly do feel it when they are reading.
Ghost Eaters is both well-written and well-paced. Clay McLeod Chapman writes with a style that is clean, clear, concise, and easy to engage with very similar in manner to Stephen King. The voice is, however, definitely not King’s which is a positive aspect in that it isn’t trying to mimic anyone else’s.
The pace of plot development is also well-done. The story unfolds at a rate that holds your interest but doesn’t move so quickly that there isn’t any suspense and you’re left wondering where the story went.
Are the ghosts real?
This is a question I continuously asked myself throughout most of the story. The characters in the novel see extremely convincing ghosts, but is the drug they are using to see them (conveniently called “Ghost”) opening a sort of portal to the underworld or are they just causing them to hallucinate?
This uncertainty keeps readers on edge for most of the book but is resolved towards the end when the main character, Erin, finally figures out what is going on.
The Twist
Who doesn’t like a good twist? The best stories always seem to have them and Ghost Eaters is no exception. I am about to explain the twist, so if you haven’t read the book and didn’t stop reading despite my warning above, this is your second chance. That is unless you want to find out what it is.
The answer as to whether ghosts are real is yes and no. In the novel, they aren’t real in the sense that they are phantoms floating through walls, but rather they are drug-induced, hallucinated distortions of things the characters are actually seeing. In that sense, they are still very much so phantasmagoric.
The drugs make the characters’ minds distort the horrors they are actually seeing into whatever they want to see. Erin, for example, sees her dead boyfriend, Silas, while a desperate mother who lost her son sees him everywhere.
I used the word “horrors” above intentionally because in reality, they are seeing creatures that have been birthed by the way the drug is produced. These creatures are essentially little, blobby monsters without much of a form and serve as a blank canvas on which the drug-user’s imagination can paint its picture.
How The Drug Is Grown
I mentioned that a byproduct of the way the “Ghost” is grown is the little creatures, but haven’t talked about how the drug is grown yet. This is a big part of the twist and horror of the novel.
The drug is plant-based which means it has to be grown. The basis for its growth isn’t soil but rather the people taking it. The more of the drug they consume or the spores they inhale, the more the plant starts to take over their bodies. They start to waste away and it eventually kills them… well, mostly.
At the very end of the novel, Erin discovers Silas’s corpse in a box of soil in the basement of their drug house. The drug is growing out of it, but the living plant reanimates his corpse. He is, in a way, still alive as he can still talk, reason and move, but the reader is left unsure whether Silas is actually there, whether it is only the plant mimicking Silas, or whether Erin is hallucinating the entire situation.
Conclusion
Erin’s heavy use of the drug means that the plant has also taken hold of her. Fortunately for her, she is able to escape and get help at a hospital before it is able to kill her. She makes a mostly full recovery, although her experiences have more or less left her life in taters.
I enjoyed the novel supremely and can only recommend it to anyone interested in the horror genre. Normally, I prefer “standard” ghost stories with haunted houses and the works, but this was a fascinating break from that trope and has certainly earned its place in the ranks of fictional horror.
