(courtesy Simon & Schuster)
Passion projects are always a delight to read.
There’s something about a novel that an author has long held close to their heart that reads with extra vivacity, reflecting a prevailing love of genre or storytelling style that has had to be put aside for other work but which has now, quite joyously, found the light of publishing day.
That’s not to say it’s better than the work that has gone before it, and certainly in the case of Amy Hutton, her previous novels, Love From Scratch and Sit, Stay, Love, exemplars of the rom-com genre that breathe with light, fun and real emotional meaning (and dogs!), have made for very good reading indeed.
But there is something a little extra about Ghosted, releasing this September from Simon & Schuster Australia, a sign that Hutton has realised a long held dream, something she explicitly states in the acknowledgement section of the novel when she says “I’ve always loved a ghost story … you’ve got to write what you love and what’s in your heart and this is the story that was nestled there.
Remaining true to herself has well and truly paid off for Hutton who has clearly poured her belief that ghosts would once again have their time – she alludes to vampires, and you could also say, zombies, having their time but the reality is, ghosts come with a romantically gothic cachet that can’t be beat – into Ghosted which flies off the page with a vibrancy that brings both its characters and story to glowing afterlife.
He reaches across the desk and pull my hand from my face. Warmth rushes up my arm from his touch, as that intangible thing I felt from the momet we met stutters in my heart. I quickly snatch my hand away.
Impressively Hutton manages to bring both a beautifully percolating rom-com, which has been her strength to date, and paranormal darkness and hellishness into the one narrative without one even beginning to crowd out the other.
This is no easy thing to do; one false move either way and your rom-com is stomped all over by supernatural forces long past the flutter of butterflies in the stomach and swooning at the sight of their beloved, or the power and force of once-human beings well beyond our mortal understanding are lost in the beating of hearts and the sighing of romance-laden breaths.
Ghosted manages to balance the two quite wonderfully, offering up a story in which Holly, a psychic with fairly amazing, ghost banishing powers who has always been labelled a “freak” by people too cowardly to understand the world is not limited to their very vanilla lane, and Callum, host of a paranormal podcast who proved to be better at exposing the supernatural than being a good boyfriend, get to reconnect after two years part.
It’s not the most ideal way to rekindle a ruptured romance, and to be honest, Holly only agrees because it gives her a chance to investigate some very dark and intriguing goings-on at the East Mill mansion of the Western family who have long ruled over the small town which has suffered under the presence of the family and a home which, it is rumoured, has seen some terrible, heart-stopping things.
(courtesy official author site)
Holly would like to leave Callum well and truly in a deeply hurt past but the house seems to be calling to her and while she’d like to listen to her heart which urges her to run away from Callum as far as she can get, she can’t resist the sense that destiny awaits her at the mansion.
That may sound portentous, and in many ways it is, but it’s also romantic in a way that Hutton executes with thoughtfulness, heart and some skillfully wrought dialogue as Holly and Callum sort through past wrongs, admit to some fairly seismic missteps (mostly Callum’s to be fair) and investigate what has made the Western’s mansion, and indeed the preternaturally beautiful and long-living family themselves, so damn creepy and threatening.
Are all stories about murders in the town true? Were the Westerns at the heart of the seventeenth-century with trials which preceded Salem’s more infamous ones? And what deeply unnerving and horrifically awful secrets lie in wait in a mansion that seems to possess a malevolent life of its own.
Lots of questions, but Hutton has brilliantly imagined and executed answers, serving them up at the just the right moment and in the most perfectly tensioned of ways, keeping the link between mystery and its solving taut and compelling all the way through, seeding the narrative with some deliciously clever false ends whose sense of a premature end are met with another revving of immersively beguiling narrative momentum.
‘I think we should get through this investigation first,’ I say. ‘There’s too much happening here and we need to be totally focused on that. Then let’s see where we’re at when we get home. What do you think?’
While there are some very dark moments in Ghosted – what kind of supernatural tale would it be if there weren’t? – and you are definitely giving a guided tour of the grimy underbelly of the human condition, the novel excels in constantly pointing itself towards the sense that while the dead may be powerful in non-corporeal form, the living have the edge when it comes to love, family and meaningful connection.
That might seem twee but Hutton wouldn’t know twee if she tripped over it, and so, Ghosted, while it may celebrate the wonders of living and the darkness of throwing your lot in with demonically evil power, feels real, authentic and robustly, emotionally honest.
The story doesn’t shy away from the fact that people will do some terrible things for their own selfish ends, and good lord, some of the characters in the story, living and dead will make your skin crawl (in the best ghost story kind of way), but it counters that with people like Callum and Holly, and Callum’s friend Jason, and Holly’s sister and father who are proof positive that, no matter the pain of the past, whether romantic or familial, that good things can still lie in wait for you.
Ghosted may be chilling and foreboding at times, but it is also light, funny and incredibly emotionally thoughtful, a story that looks at both the better and lesser angels of our nature, and decides that terrible though people can be in death and life, that great, selfless things are possible too and we just have to be brave enough to take them on and see where they lead. (Spoiler alert: it’s somewhere good … eventually.)