The Saturday Night Ghost Club

A Novel

By: Craig Davidson

Narrated by: Corey Brill

Length: 5 hrs and 40 mins

Publisher's summary

International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award - 2020
OLA Evergreen Award - 2019
Rogers Writers' Trust Fiction Prize - 2018

An infectious and heartbreaking novel from "one of this country's great kinetic writers" (Globe and Mail) - Craig Davidson's first new literary fiction since his best-selling, Giller-short-listed Cataract City

When neurosurgeon Jake Baker operates, he knows he's handling more than a patient's delicate brain tissue - he's altering their seat of consciousness, their golden vault of memory. And memory, Jake knows well, can be a tricky thing.

When growing up in 1980s Niagara Falls, aka Cataract City - a seedy but magical, slightly haunted place - one of Jake's closest confidants was his uncle Calvin, a sweet but eccentric misfit enamored of occult artifacts and outlandish conspiracy theories. The summer Jake turned 12, Calvin invited him to join the "Saturday Night Ghost Club" - a seemingly lighthearted project to investigate some of Cataract City's more macabre urban myths. Over the course of that life-altering summer, Jake not only fell in love and began to imagine his future, he slowly, painfully came to realize that his uncle's preoccupation with chilling legends sprang from something buried so deep in his past that Calvin himself was unaware of it.

By turns heartwarming and devastating, written with the skill and cinematic immediacy that has made Craig Davidson a star, The Saturday Night Ghost Club is a bravura performance from one of our most remarkable literary talents: a note-perfect novel that poignantly examines the fragility and resilience of mind, body, and human spirit as well as the haunting mutability of memory and story.

©2018 Craig Davidson (P)2018 Knopf Canada

Critic reviews

Nominated for the OLA Evergreen Award 2019

Finalist, Rogers Writers' Trust Fiction Prize 2018

"Davidson makes beautifully clear how the ghoulish tales we feared when we were young can’t compare to the blood-bathed teeth we eventually encounter as adults. The Saturday Night Ghost Club is a tale for those who like their Stranger Things spiked, Stand by Me charred, and who are battered enough yet still brave enough to revisit that moment when made-up horrors finally come to root in a world beyond invention. A novel that both stabs and breaks your heart." (Mark Z. Danielewski, best-selling author of House of Leaves)

"A moving, delightful, thrillingly unexpected coming-of-age story about the irresistible collision of childhood's dark wonders and adulthood's haunting mysteries." (Elan Mastai, author of All Our Wrong Todays)

"A nostalgia-driven coming-of-age thriller in the vein of Netflix’s hit series Stranger Things and golden-age 1980s Stephen King. Davidson writes so convincingly from a twelve-year-old boy’s perspective - vividly capturing those first pangs of love and the torture of being bullied - that it takes the puzzle of unravelling Uncle C’s troubled mind and the scalpel-sharp sections in which adult Jake describes his work as a brain surgeon to remind readers that this is, in fact, a book about the disquieting nature of memory and the stealthy ways the past can haunt someone. For sheer storytelling prowess, and the chops to scare readers screwy with monsters both real and of our own imagining, the label of Canada’s Stephen King...belongs to Craig Davidson, claws down." (Stacey Madden, Quill & Quire)

The most heartbreaking ghost story I've ever read!

Both heartbreaking and hopeful, THE SATURDAY NIGHT GHOST CLUB is testimony to both the strength and fragility of the human spirit.

Stunning performance by Mr. Brill.