The Ghostkeeper: 11/04/24

The Ghostkeeper by Johanna Taylor (2024) is a graphic novel about grief and superstition. While Sloane Crosley's memoir asserts that Grief is for People, Dorian Lieth knows first hand that it's also for ghosts.

Dorian can see ghosts and has made it his life's work to serve as their therapist to help them sleep so they can return to purgatory. There they will find Death's door and open it to the afterlife.

Grief for ghosts takes the form of ghostly fungi or rot that clings to them and robs them of their senses and their sense of well being. It also keeps them awake. Ghosts that can't find rest become banshees.

Dorian is but one person and can only do so much. He's faced with an untenable situation: ghosts who can't crossover and a town that is sick of dealing with an ever increasing population of frantic ghosts.

While the blurb of for the book compares this graphic novel to the Lockwood & Co series by Jonathan Stroud and The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson (1959), I am reminded of two other things instead: the film Frighteners (1996) and Under the Whispering Door by T.J. Klune (2021).

As with so many ghost stories, this graphic novel sits on the Road Narrative Spectrum. Dorian as he's working with the ghosts is in a scarecrow/minotaur traveler (99) situation in that he is trying to help but is seen as a threat by those he's helping. His destination is utopia (FF), namely the unknown beyond Death's door. His route there is the tkaronto (FF) as represented by the swamp/bog outside the village and the swampy conditions of purgatory.

Five stars

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