Today’s column is about ghosts—some literal, some figurative, and some that I’ve kind of shoe-horned in so they fit into this particular stack. Maybe it’s because I’ve been playing some Hades II lately—my daughter got it for me as a Father’s Day gift last week, so I’ve been spending a lot of time in the Underworld, talking to various Roman gods and walking among shades. October is months away, but that doesn’t mean you can’t enjoy some good ghost stories now.
Chelsea just wants to be a normal high school kid. She’s finally one of the popular girls—or, at least, has been accepted by them—and things are looking up. So it’s not great when her classmates find out about her dad’s ghostbusting business, Ghost Roast, and it’s even worse when she gets stuck working for her dad all summer as punishment for a wild night out with her new friends.
Ghost Roast has been hired to exorcise Harrington Manor: the owner wants to turn it into a boutique hotel, but first he needs to clean up its reputation so that ghost hunters will stop showing up there—not quite the clientele he’s hoping to attract. While he doesn’t really believe in ghosts himself, he thinks having Ghost Roast do their thing will help him clean up the manor’s image. Of course—as you may have guessed—it turns out that there are some actual ghosts there. And what’s more: Chelsea discovers that she can actually see them without the help of her dad’s fancy gizmos. Among the ghosts is Oliver, a boy who appears to be about her age—and as they get to know each other, Chelsea realizes that there’s more to this story than her dad understands, and it’s up to her to keep Oliver alive. Er, undead?
Chelsea has to balance a lot of things: she likes her new friends but is constantly reminded of how different they are—they just come from such different worlds, and they don’t seem to understand what it means that she’s been grounded. She’s embarrassed by her dad’s chosen job, but once she starts seeing ghosts, she’s eager to get to the manor to find out more about Oliver’s story, which is also one of the central mysteries of the book. Nobody seems to mention him when talking about the Harringtons, and he doesn’t remember how he died.
While it is mostly a fun story, it does touch on some more weighty topics, too. Harrington Manor started out as a plantation, a fact that does not go unnoticed by Chelsea and her dad, who are Black. There are some conversations about the ugly history of the mansion and how some stories were omitted or erased in the name of making things “respectable.” It’s all done in a way that is integrated into the plot, and helps to flesh out the characters in the book, too. I enjoyed this one—the illustrations are also a lot of fun, often switching to an exaggerated cartoony style when characters have extreme reactions.
This graphic novel trilogy—Sheets, Delicates, and Lights—features a young girl, a laundromat, and actual ghosts (who float around covered by a sheet with eye holes). I first read Sheets after Mariana Ruiz wrote about it in 2018, and then I wrote about Delicates in 2021. Marjorie has been running the family laundromat since her mother died, and one day Wendell the ghost shows up in her laundromat and causes a lot of chaos. Eventually, however, Marjorie and Wendell become really good friends—though she has to keep him (and the other ghosts) a secret. Delicates introduces us to Eliza, a classmate who has some trouble fitting in. Although the book doesn’t ever spell it out, Eliza’s portrayal implies that she is autistic; she has a particular interest in ghosts and trying to catch them on film that other people don’t quite understand. Marjorie tries to befriend her, but she is also friends with some of the more popular kids who bully Eliza, which leads to a lot of tension. And, of course, she’s still trying to hide Wendell from her friend who is fascinated by ghosts, so that also sets some things in motion.
Lights completes the trilogy, and it digs into Wendell’s story. He has some snippets of memories from his life but he can’t remember most of it. He knows he drowned, but can’t remember how it happened. As Marjorie and Eliza investigate, various places trigger Wendell’s memories—a girl he calls the Sea Witch figures heavily in the memories, and the girls try to figure out what her role was. This book is the longest of the three, and it really draws you in with the slow reveal of Wendell’s story, but also the ups and downs as Marjorie and Eliza figure out how to be friends in light of what has happened before. It’s not always comfortable to read, since it involves a child’s death, but Thummler handles the subject with sensitivity and it’s a very moving story.
When this collection arrived, it had been a while since I’d read the first two, so I re-read from the beginning, and I really loved the way the characters grew over the course of the three books, and particularly enjoyed the way the relationships developed and deepened between them. The three books are available now individually (and also in deluxe hardcover editions), but this slipcover softcover edition will be released in September.
Kit isn’t exactly a ghost, but she is dead. This graphic novel is inspired by a Buddhist tradition that a person’s soul takes 49 days between life and rebirth. We don’t know at first how Kit died, but we find her on a shore, where she begins to travel according to a little map. And then she dies. The next day, she wakes up where she died and continues on the path until she dies again. Sometimes she slips and falls, sometimes she drowns, once a branch fell on her head.
Intermingled with Kit’s journey through this transitional world, we see glimpses of the land of the living: her mom, brother, and sister deal with her absence and grieve in their own way. They talk about Kit, and also try to handle necessary arrangements like clearing out her apartment. We also get flashbacks to Kit’s life, seeing glimpses of both her child and the start of her adulthood that was cut short.
Kit and her family are Korean Americans, and one of the things that comes up in the memories is making kimchi with her mother: they make enormous batches in a very labor-intensive process. The memories include both the good and the bad both when they enjoyed working together and when they fought, and the making of the kimchi also becomes one of the ways that Kit’s family ends up working through their grief together.
Over the course of the 49 days, Kit works through her own feelings about her death as well, eventually reaching the point of acceptance and readiness. Lee explains in the Author’s Note that her portrayal of this is “deliberately vague”—it’s not intended to be comprehensive or absolute, but is one depiction of a soul’s journey and a family’s experience with it. It’s a thoughtful, contemplative book; even though it portrays an imagined realm, the parts that are set in our world feel very real, with both tears and laughter as the family reaches their own states of acceptance and readiness.
Valerie tries so hard to be a good girl according to her mom’s expectations: she studies hard, and she stays thin. What nobody knows—not even her mother—is that she does it by purging herself after meals. She has internalized a lot of the things that her mother tells her: that boys won’t like her if she’s fat, that being healthy means being thin. And even though she bristles when her mom comments on her best friend Jordan’s weight, some of that prejudice had taken root in her own mind as well. When Valerie takes a trip to Paris with her French class, it’s her first time away on her own away from her parents, and she is excited for the possibilities, being in the most romantic city in the world with the boy that she has a crush on … but it’s a lot harder for her to manage her eating—and her purging—and things soon fall apart.
In the Afterword, Ying notes that Valerie’s story was inspired by her own experience with eating disorders, and that books like this one are part of what nudged her to find a better way. It wasn’t an easy book to read: while I never had the same struggles, I did hear echoes from my own family in some of what Val’s mother said. In my experience, Chinese people put a strong emphasis on being thin (as do Americans) but they are often a lot more blunt and open about it, the way that Val’s mother is. I’m not sure whether that’s better or worse, but some of the conversations in the book may be surprising or shocking to readers who assume that there are things people wouldn’t say out loud to each other.
The book does have a happy—or at least bittersweet—ending. Val is at least on the first steps to getting better, and also in figuring out the sort of relationship she can have with her mother even when there are things they don’t understand about each other.
How does this book fit into the ghost theme? Well, I’m sorry to inform you that Linney the cat is no longer with us, but she lives on in these comics. Knisley explains that the best way to draw cats isn’t with an “accurate visual representation,” by drawing their personality. Thus, Linney appears as an orange blob with no nose, but anyone who has been around cats (especially orange cats) can see how perfectly Knisley has captured her.
The book is a collection of little vignettes, sometimes just a panel or two and sometimes longer. There isn’t an overarching plot line, just scenes in the life of a cat who is absolutely sure that she is in charge of everything. Linney is delightfully weird, and the book is a lot of fun to read, even with its more serious coda when it becomes clear that it’s time for Linney to go. If you love cats with outsized personalities (I mean, is there really any other kind?), then you’ll enjoy this one.
Oscar Zahn is a paranormal investigator. He also happens to be dead: just a floating skull that somehow controls a suit as a body, though most people see him as a fleshed-out person. He goes about dealing with various strange occurrences: a monster under the bed, a not-exactly-German tank in World War One, an SOS signal emanating from deep under the sea. We are treated to flashbacks aplenty, often showing how Oscar first met somebody, but there are still a lot of mysteries about Oscar’s past waiting to be filled in, like what’s with the weird “ectopus” that lives in his head?
I really loved the artwork in this one, which kind of looks like Tintin if it were illustrated by Mike Mignola—lots of weird creatures and characters, and machines powered by bizarre psychic energy sources. It’s also just a lot of fun to read: the dialogue is quirky and Oscar gets himself into a lot of troublesome situations. Even though it’s a fantastical story, though, there are some profound reflections about death mixed in with giant tentacles and undead soldiers.
This book started off as a Web Toon, so you can read it online here. The book collects the first 65 episodes (of 100 listed on the site), so I hope there will be a Volume Two because it makes for a very nice hardcover edition, though it’ll probably be a bit of a wait—Volume One comes out in September.
My Current Stack
I did finish reading All This & More by Peng Shepherd and I’m still reading May Contain Lies by Alex Edmans (both mentioned two weeks ago). I’ve also started reading You Cannot Mess This Up by Amy Weinland Daughters, which is kind of a time travel story and kind of a woman working through some intergenerational traumas. I also just started a re-read of the The Wicked + The Divine comic book series by Kieron Gillen and Jamie McKelvie. I’d picked up the first three hardcover collections back in 2019 and really enjoyed it, but somehow had missed when the fourth hardcover (and a bonus fifth?) was published in 2020 … and now it’s going for absurd prices on eBay. So I finally gave in and picked up the paperback versions instead even though it means now I have a mismatched set, but now I can finally finish the story—starting from the beginning again, of course.
Disclosure: Other than where noted, I received review copies of these books. Affiliate links to Bookshop.org help support my writing and independent booksellers!