The Saturday Night Ghost Club

Jake Baker, a neurosurgeon in Toronto, opens his narrative with a meditation on the fragility of the human brain. Memories, he reflects, are stories people tell themselves to cope, and buried truths act like bloodhounds that eventually track their owners down. Throughout the narrative, Jake intersperses cases from his medical practice that illuminate the brain's power to create, distort, and protect memories.

Jake turns back to his childhood in Niagara Falls, Ontario, a city locals call Cataract City: a place stuck in time, where buildings collapse and are never replaced. His chief ally against loneliness is Uncle Calvin Sharpe, his mother's older brother, an eccentric with bone-white hair who treats urban legends and folklore as fact. When a young Jake is convinced a monster lives in his closet, Uncle C arrives with a "monster tracer" (actually a stud finder), diagnoses the creature as a "Slurper Slug," a closet-dwelling monster, and sets a trap. The next morning, Jake finds a lump of obsidian as proof the creature has been caught.

Jake frames the central narrative as an account, "as I choose to remember it," of his twelfth summer and the Saturday Night Ghost Club. The summer begins when Percy Elkins, a former friend turned bully, throws a firecracker at Jake's face on the last day of school. A girl intervenes, hitting Percy with a rock until he retreats. Jake's father, Sam Baker, comes from a brawling clan known as "the Breakers"; his mother, Cecilia Sharpe, is bookish and pacifist.

Uncle C owns the Occultorium, a cramped, matte-black shop on Clifton Hill filled with occult arcana: tarot decks, Ouija boards, and a stuffed raven perched above the register. His oldest friend and neighboring shop owner, Lexington Galbraith, runs a failing video store and serves as the skeptical counterbalance to Uncle C's beliefs.

One afternoon, Billy Yellowbird, a quiet boy recently arrived from Slave Lake with his mother and sister, enters the Occultorium to contact his deceased grandmother. Uncle C discovers a forgotten device he calls a "spirit phone." When Billy types his grandmother's name, the machine emits disturbing sounds: screams, whispers, and breathing whose cadence matches Jake's heartbeat. Uncle C yanks the plug. He then takes the boys to a funeral home so Billy can say goodbye to his grandmother. Uncle C proposes the Saturday Night Ghost Club, a weekly venture to investigate haunted places.

Billy's fourteen-year-old sister, Dove Yellowbird, arrives at the Occultorium and is revealed as the girl who hit Percy with the rock. She carries herself with bold self-assurance that produces an instant, electric effect on Jake. Billy later explains that Dove takes medication that makes her "less Dove" and that she lives "like a sun does" in a state of heat and light.

The Ghost Club meetings take the group to sites steeped in local legend. At the Screaming Tunnel, Uncle C lights a match at midnight and Jake perceives, or believes he perceives, a ghostly shape reaching toward him before he faints. That night, Jake hears Uncle C weeping in the dark. In the morning, Jake finds disturbing charcoal drawings, including a woman's indistinct face. Another expedition takes them to an oxbow lake where a car lies submerged on the bottom after crashing through the ice years before. Jake also notices ugly scars on Uncle C's chest, which his mother once dismissed as "just an old accident."

Through the summer, Dove's restlessness intensifies. She tries to buy a one-way bus ticket out of town. When Jake tells her she is "like the sun," the phrase wounds her because it echoes something painful someone else has said. She tells him not to try to save her. During a midnight adventure, Dove asks Jake to be her "death partner," to hold her hand as she passes into "the long dark," her grandmother's term for death. Jake promises and reflects that he will never fall for anyone as hard as he fell for Dove.

The penultimate Ghost Club meeting takes them to a burned house on a hill. Uncle C tells the story of a young couple terrorized by strangers; despite the husband's efforts, his wife died. After the story, Uncle C breaks down weeping. Lex wraps his arms around Calvin, stays to comfort him, and later drives the boys home. Jake recognizes in Lex the look of someone helpless to protect a person he loves.

Jake avoids Uncle C after that night. When they meet in late September, Uncle C proposes one final mission at Fairview Cemetery. Conflicted, Jake tells his parents about the summer for the first time. His mother devises a plan: Jake will go, and his parents will follow. At the cemetery, Uncle C tells the legend of Black Agnes, a woman who lost her daughter to the river and wandered its banks until she died. Jake's parents arrive and his mother shines a flashlight on a nearby gravestone: LYDIA SHARPE, 1949–1975. Uncle C stares at the name but claims not to recognize it.

Back home, Jake's mother reveals Uncle C's true history. Calvin met Lydia Nix in college in 1968. They married and moved into a house on a hill outside the city, the same house from the Ghost Club meeting. When Lydia was pregnant, two recently paroled men broke in and terrorized the couple. Calvin drove his injured wife toward town, but on a bridge the car crashed through a barrier and plunged into the oxbow lake, the same car the Ghost Club had explored. Lydia and the unborn child died. Calvin surfaced with massive cranial injuries. When he awoke weeks later, his hair had turned white and he remembered nothing: not Lydia, not the marriage, not the attack. His brain had created an almost seamless overlay, erasing her entirely. The pragmatic physics student became a mystic who opened the Occultorium and filled his life with the occult. Six years after Lydia's death, Calvin set fire to the house and was found with self-inflicted stab wounds to his chest, the scars Jake had noticed. He could not recall doing any of it. Jake's mother chose to let Calvin live within his mind's protective fiction, and everyone who loved him joined in a conspiracy of silence. She asks Jake to keep the secret.

Addressing the reader, Jake meditates on memory's malleability, quoting biologist Gerald Edelman's comparison of memory to the melting and refreezing of a glacier rather than an inscription on rock. He acknowledges that everything he has told is true, but everything in him wants it to be true.

The final chapter unfolds on Halloween night. Uncle C takes Jake and Billy trick-or-treating. Dove rides up with a stolen pumpkin on her head, steals a Tootsie Roll, and vanishes. Jake provides flash-forwards: Dove ends up in San Francisco making sculptures; Billy becomes a football star, then returns to Slave Lake for outreach work. Uncle C never marries again; he adopts a black Lab named Skeptic and attends Sunday dinners at Jake's parents' house. The novel closes years later with Uncle C kneeling beside Jake's young son, Nicholas, on Halloween night. He tells the boy about friendly ghosts, spirits who have lost their way and wish to guide the living to safety, and says, "And that is why I'll always believe in ghosts."