Gracetown, Florida, 1950. Twelve-year-old Robbie Stephens Jr kicks the son of the richest white family in town for insulting his sister, and is sentenced to six months at the Gracetown School for Boys, a reformatory with a graveyard it does not talk about. Robbie can see haints, the ghosts of boys who never left, and the man who runs the place has a use for a boy who can see the dead. His sister Gloria, sixteen and ferocious, spends the whole book trying to get him out before Gracetown keeps him. It is a ghost story where the ghosts are the second scariest thing in it.
Exhibit C: Gloria and Robbie, headed anywhere but Gracetown. The lights above the trees are not fireflies, and they are on the children's side.
What Happens (spoilers, historic)
The kick. One kick, in defence of his sister, and the machinery of Jim Crow Florida closes around Robbie like a trap built long before he was born.
The Reformatory. Beatings called discipline, labour called education, and the Funhouse, which is not one. The haints watch from the treeline because they remember all of it.
Haddock's bargain. The superintendent learns what Robbie can see and wants the haints caught. Robbie has to choose between betraying the dead and joining them.
Gloria's war. Letters, lawyers, favours, secrets, and finally something much less legal. The club agreed Gloria is the greatest sibling in the archive and it is not close.
The escape. The last hundred pages are a chase we all read in one sitting, in four different houses, texting each other things like NO and HE'S BEHIND THE TREE.
Weird Things
The reformatory is based on the real Dozier School for Boys in Marianna, Florida, which operated for 111 years. Investigators later found dozens of unmarked graves. The horror is the historical part.
Tananarive Due's own great-uncle, Robert Stephens, died at Dozier in 1937. The hero carries his name. That footnote quietly wrecked the whole club.
It swept awards season, including the Bram Stoker for best horror novel, and the club's own award, Book Most Likely To Make You Stare At A Wall Afterwards.
The scariest character has no supernatural powers whatsoever. Discussed for forty-five minutes. Minuted.
The Club Record
Kel's pick, and the reason her taste is now legally beyond question at this club. The gold plaque on the homepage is not a joke. Well, it is a joke, but it is also deserved, which is the most annoying kind of joke. The little lights drifting up this page are for the boys in the graveyard. Even this shrine knows when to be sincere for a minute.