This book brought the creep factor with the eeriness of dead world completely in line with ours, just invisible to most eyes. The ghouls that feed off sadness was an especially ingenious, and hair raising, addition. I liked that Jake did not only see the ghosts of dead world, but auras, ecto-mist, and something beyond both the living world and the dead world. He would slip in and out of his world and dead world, connected to both but never fully in one or the other. An overlapping of sorts, which makes it hard for him to exist in the living world, often zoning out. Which adds to his inability to make friends, and makes him more of a target than he already is as a black teenager at an all white school. Now, a large part of the focus of this book is on the ghost that is haunting Jake. The malevolent spirit of a school shooter. The parts that really resonate were how much he and Jake had in common, and yet how they experience or handle things so differently. Both boys are bullied by a specific student athlete who faces no repercussions, both feel isolated and without a support system, both have siblings that do not understand or help them, both have absentee mothers and no good male role models. Jake is at times sympathetic with Sawyer, the shooter, as he begins to understand his pain. Both boys are also hiding their sexuality because they were made to feel wrong by male authority figures. However, Jake turns to friends for help, does not drift into loneliness too much, and knows when he has done something unforgivable. In terms of Sawyer, the horror of this book is not just the ghosts and ghouls, but witnessing the making of a mass shooter. Sawyer was once an impressionable child too, and he needed help which he did not receive. He was pulled from the mental institution he was actually receiving good care from, only to live with his toxic family who could not understand anything about him or help him heal. When you think of mass shootings you always wonder how it got this far, what went wrong that a teenager would do this to fellow students? Where did the system fail, or were these teenagers simply rotten? In this book there is a lot of fear of otherness, of mental illness, of the LGBTQIA+ community, of black students. If instead of fearing these groups, if people tried to understand, tried to build bridges, then maybe the horrific would cease to exist. All Jake wants is to be himself, to exist safely in his space, but because of how other people view him, he must always be on guard, always play a role to suit other people. It is sad and frustrating. The same could be said for Sawyer, if his mother had just left him in care at the institution, instead of fearing judgement about his mental illness, then maybe he would have received the help he needed. This book hit all the right emotional spots, while also being horrific. I highly recommend you read it!
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