Friday at the Branches: The Night Strangers

The Night Strangers by Chris Bohjalian 2011

Bestselling author Chris Bohjalian takes a different genre, the ghost story, and weaves a well-written novel with many intricate plot twists. Pilot Chip Linton, his wife, and twin daughters move to a small White Mountain village in New Hampshire to get away from the memories of his passenger plane crashing into L. Champlain where, unlike the “Miracle on the Hudson”, 39 on board died. Suffering from PTSD, Chip is very much diminished from the high-flyer he used to be. Their new Victorian home was once the site of a young boy’s suicide and has 39 locks on a basement door. It has secret passages, hidden weapons and a secret crypt. Then Chip begins to receive visits from dead passengers. If that plot wasn’t enough to send chills down your spin then a secondary plot, filled with neighbours who are New Age herbalists and occultists with designs on possessing the Linton twins, weaves its way through this spooky story. Those who like Audrey Niffinegger’s ghost story Her Fearful Symmetry and Stephen Irwin’s The Dead Path will enjoy Bohjalian’s new novel The Night Strangers.

Fiction Pick of the Week: The Guardians

The Guardians by Andrew Pyper

It only took me two days to read The Guardians by Andrew Pyper – it was that good. The story centres around four childhood friends, who played on their high school hockey team called “The Guardians”. The novel opens with Trevor, Randy, and Carl each going back to their small Ontario town for their friend Ben’s funeral. Ben has committed suicide and the remaining three must come to grips with not only his sudden death but with something even more sinister. Trevor, Randy, and Carl have been keeping details of a mysterious crime they were all involved with twenty-four years earlier locked up. But travelling back to Grimshaw and once again seeing the abandoned house at 321 Caledonia Street brings all the bad memories back – and more!

Fiction Pick of the Week: Her Fearful Symmetry

Her Fearful Symmetry by Audrey Niffenegger 2009

Written by the author of the very successful Time Traveler’s Wife, Her Fearful Symmetry is a modern day gothic romantic ghost story. Twenty-year-old “mirror” twins, Valentina and Julia have to spend a year in their deceased Aunt Elspeth’s London flat next to the Highgate Cemetery in order to inherit their aunt’s fortune. Quirky characters, such as an inventor of crossword puzzles with Obsessive Compulsive Disorder living above them, a former young lover on the floor below plus the ghost of Elspeth in their flat create a recipe for a fabulous ghost story. Niffeneger has a deft way of invoking a ghostly atmosphere with her prose. It will make a great movie!

Watch the trailer here: