Book Review: Ghost Eaters by Clay McLeod Chapman

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“Life is too short. But it doesn’t have to be.”

📚

Erin can’t seem to set boundaries with her ex-boyfriend, Silas. She was attracted to his recklessness and charisma while they dated in college, but those feelings have faded, and when Silas asks her to bail him out of rehab yet again, she knows she has to draw the line, break the cycle, prioritize her own recovery and needs. So she cuts him off, an act that proves both brutal and final after Silas dies of an overdose. With her life in a tailspin, Erin turns to a friend who offers her Ghost, a new drug he claims enables users to see the dead, failing to mention it comes with profound and irreversible side effects.

With history-rich Richmond, Virginia, as its primary backdrop, Ghost Eaters is a searing meditation on the weight and gravity of grief and addiction that immediately pulls the reader into its gruesome orbit. Giving fresh depth and dimension to fungal horror/sporror, it contains some of the most creative and appalling body horror imaginable (on par with Danger Slater’s House of Rot, which sets a high bar), as well as utterly engrossing, nightmarish, heart-palpitating, anxiety-inducing scenes that rocket into otherworldly dimensions of horrific, to the point they’re almost funny at times, masterfully toeing the line between horror and comedy. It’s an exploration of what is, what could have been, and what will never be; an ode to destruction and decay; an intense and discerning examination of vulnerability and the human condition.

Through its visceral melding of reality and fantasy, mundane and supernatural, ghostly and gothic, and its incredible execution and mesmerizing narrative, Ghost Eaters redefines the concept of specters and séances, spirits and hauntings, homes and bodies, structures and vessels, and realities and ideals. Splattered with blood and bliss, it’s a terrifying page-turner of love, devotion, obsession, and lunacy; loss, longing, despair, and desperation; suffering, loneliness, emptiness, and isolation; life, death, possession, and incantation; success, failure, ruin, and waste; use, abuse, cruelty, and betrayal; and choice, connection, trauma, and place. It lays the grisly truth bare via pages littered with sigils, seeds, mushrooms, and spores; apparitions, hallucinations, revenants, and doorways; history, heritage, legacy, and rage; and receptacles, lies, highs, and visitations.

This book is special. It burrows deeply, churns and marinates, makes readers feel, think, struggle, want, recoil, and wretch. Perfectly speckled with humor and loaded with emotion, wonderful twists, believable characters, and nuanced writing, Ghost Eaters is an epic tale of living ghosts and dead souls, empty shells and vapid lives, painful secrets and bad trips, nearly theres and rock bottoms, explosive ectoplasm and extensive roots. Strewn with bodies consumed from within and violated from without, it’s at once literal and metaphorical, understated and brilliant, emphatic and dark, ingenious and blazing, and it more than cements Clay McLeod Chapman as one of this reader's favorite authors. Next up: Whisper Down the Lane and Wake Up and Open Your Eyes.

🖤Amanda

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