"Best Novel 2015" - Dark Musings Awards
When someone you love dies, are they gone forever?
Meet the Ghosters, and the desperate people who hire them.
In our modern world, only Ghosters know what comes after death. What stays behind. And what dwells between.
Ghosters are a small, loosely-connected group of individuals who travel the highways of America curing people of their hauntings. For as much money as they can negotiate from each client. They are legitimate. But they are not nice.
Here are the known Ghosters:
Stan Costello. Works with Bud Hardy. Their specialty is buying and selling bottled ghosts. For the right price, they'll bottle a fresh ghost.
Clay (last name unknown). Homely. Cold. All the food he eats tastes like mud. The apparent leader of the Ghosters. Handles the more frightening cases.
Tilda Clem. Six foot seven. Never fit in anywhere. Somewhat sympathetic to the people she takes on. But not much.
Patrick Kelly. Tall Irishman with an onion-shaped head. Along with Stan and Bud, maybe the most human of the Ghosters. Will never say a bad word about anyone. But a lot of blood on his big hands.
Matt (last name unknown). Young African-American traveling with Patrick as an apprentice, to see if he'll fit in with the group. He has the talent. But does he have the stomach?
Imagine a building where only the top two floors are haunted (and the bottom two floors are a thriving shopping mall); a haunted doll house inside an otherwise unpossessed home; family estates that are hundreds of houses long, each new house attached to the front of the previous one, the older homes disappearing into the swamps like a centipede; a haunted house that travels across America.
Imagine ghosts that can only manifest in water (like the inside of your dishwasher, or your shower stall); ghosts who believe they're still alive, pay their mortgage each month, and can interact with others; bottled ghosts that are bought and sold like vintage Coca-Cola signs; ghosts that have to share a crowded space within an animal.
If you thought life was complicated, find out what death is like. There are neeks, plums, siliths, smudges, flesh ghosts, spirit ghosts, prayer ghosts, inbreeding ghosts, and that great white shark swimming in the sea between life and afterlife, The Fear Ghost.
The stories comprising this 95,000 word novel are ten known cases in which Ghosters were involved.
What the critics are saying:
"I loved every single page of it, not least for the wealth of incidental detail and the assured way in which Moore so often circles around the crux of each story, slowly dragging it out into the light of day, letting us see and experience what is really at stake. It does for ghosts what his novel As Dead As Me did for zombies, with bells on." - Peter Tennant
"The ghosts are startlingly original creations from the mind of one of the most accomplished writers in the field...The solutions to the hauntings are spectacularly horrifying. [Moore] seamlessly fuses these elements with a genuinely sympathetic understanding of character and personal tragedy that propels this collection into the literary stratosphere" - Trevor Denyer
"Ghosters...are members of a small group who travel around America "curing" people of their hauntings...There's a lot of humour in this book but there's also real horror...[Moore] manages to invest all his characters with real personality and depth. [He]...is an extremely imaginative writer, coming up with some truly original ideas. I sincerely hope the world he's created here is one the author will return to in future publications. It's a book I urge you to buy." - Anthony Watson
Ralph Robert Moore's fiction has been published in America, Canada, England, Ireland, India and Australia in a wide variety of genre and literary magazines and anthologies, including Black Static, Shadows & Tall Trees, Midnight Street, ChiZine, and others. His short story "The Machine of a Religious Man" was included in Ellen Datlow's nineteenth edition of The Year's Best Horror and Fantasy. His story "Our Island" was one of four stories nominated in 2013 for Best Story by The British Fantasy Society. His second short story collection, I Smell Blood, tied with Justin Isis' I Wonder What Human Flesh Tastes Like for Peter Tennant's award of Best Short Story Collection of 2011. "...If I were to do a 'Top Thirty Short Stories of 2011' list, they would dominate it... Each is a superb stylist and each has a unique voice...Moore crafts tales that bristle with attitude and energy..." Moore lives with his wife Mary outside Dallas, Texas.
