Book Review: Ghost Eaters by Clay McLeod Chapman (2022)

Dec 19

Written By Wyatt

(This review contains some spoilers for the first half of the novel.)

Ghost Eaters kicks off with one of the smartest opening chapters I’ve read in quite some time: four college kids drop acid and sneak into the famed Hollywood Cemetery in Richmond, Virginia to complete a half-serious ritual in the mausoleum of the historical Richmond Vampire. Not only does this give the reader reason to doubt the events that follow, but it sets up the first cycle of a pattern which will recur throughout the novel. I’ll talk about this in more detail shortly.

This was my first foray into Chapman’s work, and I decided to pick up the novel after the author was featured in a webinar that I attended. I found his prose to be smart and polished without being indulgent, and he had a wonderful command over the development and resolution of the story. I’m eager to read more of his work.

Coming Down and Growing Up

Following the opening chapter we fast-forward a few years: the college kids have moved on to what comes after those decidedly numbered years of freeform adventure and landed unceremoniously all across the spectrum of adult life. Amara, the firebrand of the group, is meandering through a series of service and catering job, still dreaming of the day she’ll move to NYC to become a writer. Erin has taken her first steps into a promising marketing career, though her privileged upbringing never seems far behind and threatens to undermine anything she might accomplish. Tobias, the shy tagalong, is still following Silas, the enigmatic ringleader of their college days who is now a drug addict, cycling in and out of rehab between bouts on Erin’s couch. While they may no longer be the lovers they were in the opening chapter, the ties that bind are clearly holding strong, as Silas takes full advantage of Erin at every turn.

I really like what Chapman has done here. On one page we’re running from security in a graveyard, carefree and wild in the bloom of youth, and on the next we’re feeling the heady wane of real-world uncertainty. The worries the characters have–and the friendship they cherished–are upended by the passing of a few years. It’s great illustrative writing.

The novel truly begins as Erin finally seems to cast off these attachments to Silas, standing up to him and refusing to be his rescuer at the expense of her own ambitions. Unfortunately, Silas, like all manipulative ex-boyfriends, finds a way to punish her for this by dying of a drug overdose shortly thereafter.

Remember that cycle I promised to articulate at the beginning of this review? It goes something like this: the group follows Silas, Silas takes them off-course from what was presented in favor of something he planned, and they pursue the truth to their own demise until the cycle starts anew. Though I haven’t detailed specifics, this is what resulted in the opening chapter, and it’s something readers will see repeated in the book though it may not immediately be obvious that it’s happening.

At this point in the novel I am fully in as a reader. The passages are vibrant and forward-pressing, blessed with the energy that wells from a cast of mid-twenties characters with mid-twenties concerns, and I find myself struggling to put the book down and go to sleep despite a new workweek in the corporate hellscape looming.

A Funeral and a Seance

Shortly after Silas’s funeral, which Erin finds herself too devastated to attend, Tobias reaches out to the group and asks everyone to come together one more time to remember Silas. Only upon their meeting, Tobias offers them Ghost, a drug akin to psilocybin which purportedly allows the imbiber to see and even speak with the dead.

The idea of taking a mushroom to see the things you cannot is incredibly familiar, and yet it feels impressively creative and unique when inserted into a modern ghost story. Mushrooms have been a key plot point in a number of recent horror novels (Mexican Gothic, What Moves the Dead, et al.) but Ghost Eaters takes this plot point to another level as the cast of characters knowingly consume the fungus in an attempt to contact their old friend.

Readers acquainted with psychedelics will immediately recognize and appreciate how Chapman posits that perception can shift and meld in such a way, and the concept of a new frame of reality could be accessed through such a means. And my, the results are mighty.

(Un)living History

Amara, Tobias, and Erin are not only able to contact the other side, but see and be seen by every lost soul that haunts the streets of Richmond. To make matters worse, the effects of Ghost linger far beyond what was expected, and Erin finds herself perpetually haunted by the many tragic stories of Richmond’s history. From the Monacans who lived on the land before the founding of Jamestown, to the American Civil War and the hardship that followed, to victims of twentieth-century crime, the soil of Richmond is soaked in blood, and those who spilled it are hungry for the spark of life that imbibers of Ghost exude like heat from a flame.

And despite calling out to him time and time again, there’s no Silas to be found among the dead. When his grave is found empty, suspicions about what Silas was into–and what ultimately happened to him–redouble.

Erin experiences a series of harrowing and delightfully terrifying encounters which make up the novel’s finest moments. Chapman showcases a smart understanding of what makes a supernatural encounter unsettling, and his creativity shines as he sculpts the loose histories of the ghosts. If anything, I wish a bit more page space had been devoted to this leg of the story, but that may have exacerbated some issues I’ll detail later.

Not knowing how to escape her new reality, and unable to contact Silas, Erin returns to the abandoned subdivision at the outskirts of Richmond where she first took Ghost to find that Tobias has set up the makings of a cult among the plywood walls of an unfinished home. Word has spread among the broken and bereaved that there’s a house at the edge of town offering a way to reach those who have been lost. Tobias, now emaciated and filthy, has ritualized the consumption of the mushroom and set himself up a self-styled shaman of the lost.

But inside the walls of the house the dead do not walk, making it the only safe haven for Erin. There are also indications that Silas is present here, and if she’s willing to peer more deeply into the doors opened by Ghost, she may find him.

What Lies Beyond

Ghost Eaters is a remarkable novel in that it deftly handles a number of difficult subjects well without making them necessarily pivotal to the main story. The first is addiction, which touches each member of the quartet in some way, and is a defining component of Silas, the Pied Piper of the group. His death, and his friends’ subsequent reliance on Ghost in an effort to find him, are both portrayed unflinchingly and rightly represent how substance abuse can permeate and take over a friend group.

As someone with family members who have fallen into opioid addiction, the ghosts that appear and torment the living as a result of the drug are a solid stand-in for the realities of the situation, as the people who succumb to addiction are indeed perpetually haunted, their minds and personalities forever changed whether they are able to battle back from their addiction or not. It was a particularly apt interpretation, and I appreciated Chapman’s talent in making this part of his story.

To a lesser degree, he also engages the topic of Richmond’s difficult social history, with the revenants of native peoples and slaves wickedly and wonderfully interrupting the dinner parties of those who tout their Confederate pedigrees. This could easily become hackneyed, but Chapman managed to superimpose the past on the present with deftness and poise. There’s a slickness to his set crafting, his individual scenes, that is reminiscent of peak-power Stephen King. When so many writers are bumbling and ham-fisted in highlighting social justice in their work, Chapman does it here with elegance.

Residual vs. Active

All that praise being heaped, but Ghost Eaters isn’t without its shortcomings. More and more in modern novels we are seeing these main characters that are essentially without agency, vessels that simply receive the treatment of those around them, and who triumph not through cleverness or wit, but dumb luck or desperate effort.

I really liked Erin; she was authentic, intelligent, imperfectly human, and aware of her limitations, but I didn’t like that she never really found her own way. Being a marionette first to Silas and then another character for a season, she seemed like the perpetual weakling despite moments of strength. Even the marketing job she lands is because her father pulled strings behind the scenes. She always seemed to just kind of stumble into the book’s next development while chasing Silas’s ghost.

Perhaps that’s not a bad thing–it’s certainly reflective of some people in real life, but does it make for a good main character? Readers will have to decide.

I found the ending of the book to be modestly satisfying, though it didn’t assuage some of the issues cited above and sacrificed coherency in the name of some gnarly and memorable scenes. It was, however, true to the theme I identified earlier in the article, and I suppose that’s more important than having an distinctly cohesive rules about the supernatural. There were also troublesome incongruencies as to what the revenant spirits want from the living who consume Ghost, but this probably won’t bother most readers. All and all, it’s a very sharp novel from a talented author, and I look forward to reading more of Chapman’s works, past and future.

Verdict: 6.6/10

Strengths

Great writing, balancing style and substance
Strong connection to the city where it is set; Richmond is almost a character
Engages difficult subjects well
The Gen Z cast is timeless, as are the issues they face

Weaknesses

Story is a bit thin when scrutinized
Not the most dynamic cast of characters
Best bits were peripheral to the main story

You can purchase Ghost Eaters at Amazon, Barnes and Noble, or preferably, through an independent bookstore in your community.