Review: Not your everyday ghost story!
Rating: 5 out of 5
Date: 05 26, 2012
Poor Midnight Merlot. Midnight is dead. Slipped on a banana peel, but did not go for a slide. Bumped his head, and he most certainly did not wake up in the morning.Wow! What a fantastic read. Certainly not your everyday ghost story. The humour in this novel is dark but brilliant. It's like Sherlock Holmes and Watson meets Monty Python meets e. e. cummings. The dry humour is entertaining, and the wittiness of the author, and the poetic style he writes in, will leave you wanting more.Midnight Merlot, named after the time of conception (and of course, the red merlot his parents so aptly drank too much of), meets his untimely demise in the middle of a strange street. Midnight "wakes" to find out that he's actually dead, killed quite possibly, by a rogue brick and a banana peel.The author takes you through Midnight's emotions, the way he was feeling when he first finds out that he is indeed dead, to the way he feels when he witnesses his own funeral. Oh, and when he witnesses his father...ah...pleasuring himself.Midnight might be ghostly, but he tries to figure out what the spirit world is all about in relation to the real world. He tries to figure out why some ghosts can move things and he can't, why he can walk through doors and fall through ceilings, but land, otherwise, on the floor---why doesn't he fall into the earth? These are the questions that I suppose any young ghost might ask themselves. What makes up his ghostly "atoms, molecules and whatevers"?Midnight has forgotten the events up to his death, and quite frankly, doesn't really know what happened to cause his death. That's where the detectives come in, and also, his own attempts at playing sleuth.This is the first book in The Afterlife Crisis Trilogy series, and I think everyone should read this book. It's well written, with a quirky, entertaining dry humour and definitely different than most humour-style books that I've come across as of late.The book is original, taking the reader through the story in Midnight's point of view, making you feel sorry for the young ghost as he tries to figure things out.For something different, this is a must read. If I could, I'd give this book 10 stars...but alas, I can only give 5...so, 5 it is!P.S. Looking forward to reading the second and third books in this series!!