Craig Davidson

"A charismatic cast of misfits, losers, and bruisers animate this winning novel set in Niagara Falls, a.k.a. Cataract City--a slightly seedy, slightly magical, slightly haunted place, where seemingly ordinary lives are steeped in secrets, desires, troubled histories, and the occasional splash of mayhem. Like Ilium, New York, in the novels of Kurt Vonnegut, or Castle Rock, New England, in the fiction of Stephen King--or even Hawkins, Indiana, in the Netflix sensation Stranger Things, Cataract City is an invented world where lost innocence mingles with the darker shades and sharper corners of humanity. Saturday Night Ghost Club is a short, irresistible, and bittersweet coming-of-age story about a small group of kids who, under the leadership of an eccentric uncle, spend one summer investigating the validity of local ghost stories and macabre urban myths--in almost every instance getting in way over their heads. With warmth, skill, and striking, cinematic imagery, and a rare gift for conjuring totally original, unexpected, and unforgettable set pieces and tableaus that strike the reader as immediately iconic--Davidson draws us into his gritty world, reminding us that life's strange intensity and occasional magic is all around us."--

The Saturday Night Ghost Club

Caitlin

Sometimes stories are the best we can hope for. They help us to simply get by, while deeper levels of our consciousness slap bandages on wounds that hold the power to wreck us. So we tell ourselves that the people we love closed their eyes and slipped painlessly away from us. That our personal failures are the product of external forces rather than unfixable weaknesses.

I figured some people have edges that don't allow them to slot neatly into the holes society expects them to fit into, that was all.

Tiff Brunson

People think neurosurgeons cut into brains with a scalpel. Another myth. How can you carve toothpaste? An infant's brain matter is even less substantial than an adult's, like pancake batter. I operate with a sucker wand, a tool that is exactly as it sounds. As I investigate the runnels of a patient's brain it grips me that something unforgivingly solid-my wand-is moving through something ephemeral, dreamlike: a patient's memories. Though I work carefully and with a keen knowledge of the cerebral topography, my wand remains a beast blundering through fields of budding shoots. If I trample something critical, the patient may awaken lacking a vital memory. That one where they gazed into the sky as a child wondering how a star might taste, settling on breathtaking wintergreen. The smell of their newborn daughter's scalp, or that haunting tingle on their lips following their first kiss.

Kat Albanese

I heard things. Screams in a dense sonic mist, wind sawing across rusted metal, something bubbling, rainfall like ten-penny nails. I would have slammed the lid of the Psycho-Phone, crumpling the horn between the lips of the case, but I couldn't move, was paralyzed, the sounds ebbing into whale-songs as something else built behind them —a sinister presence running behind those melancholy arias. Soon all I could hear was horrid stifled breathing, breaths built out of whispers, realizing too late that the cadence of those breaths matched the rapid beat of my own heart.

Living in Cataract City shrank Dove, because it asked her to be so much less. Hanging out with me must have swelled her back to her rightful size, which I guess was why every few weeks she'd stop by for a top-up.

"Some other men came in. They filed into the kitchen one after the other, their bodies unkinking from the cold Can you imagine it? You open your front door and invite death inside."

"Give you a tip, Jake." Her fingers hadn't left my neck. My pulse quickened under her touch. "Anyone else asks, tell them you knocked the little bastard out. Because if nobody can prove it didn't happen, hell, it may as well be true. Never wake the dreamers from their dream."

Imagine trying to hold the tail of a comet as it blazes across the heavens. It's burning your hands, eating you up, but there's no malice in it; a comet can't possibly know or care about you.

But make no mistake, the girl contains fire to evaporate oceans, light to blind minor gods. If I could freeze her in the heartbeat where she skipped across the footbridge, carve her out of time and fix her in the firmament...in the deepest chambers of my heart, I know that nobody, not another soul on earth, will ever be as purely astonishing as Dove Yellowbird was in that moment.

I was scared—with that crystalline, childish fear ofbeing caught and punished. That fear thrashed behind my rib cage like a bird in cupped hands, perhaps the last truly childlike instance of that emotion I'd ever feel. That fear is a kind of magic. As you get older, the texture of your fear changes…

…Looking back, I wish I'd relished those final instants of childish fear: that saccharine-sweet taste of terror curdling like sour milk in my mouth.

The Saturday Night Ghost Club quotes

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