Review: Ghost of a Chance by Rhiannon Lassiter

I have to confess when I first heard Rhiannon Lassiter read an extract of Ghost of a Chance at the OUP Dark Fantasy event I didn't quite engage with it. Maybe it was sitting on a hard floor, maybe it was the wine I'd drunk, maybe it was just being overawed by such august company. But whatever it was, I felt entirely differently when I actually got my hands on the book and started to read.

Eva Chance, the hero, lives in the House. It's always referred to like that, the House. It's been inhabited by Chances for generations and is falling to bits and Eva's grandfather is now too old, frail and, frankly, poor to do anything much about it. Eva half loves, half hates the House. She's spent too much of her time there, raised by her grandfather and without any friends her own age. She has friends, of sorts, in the ghosts that inhabit the House, ghosts that nobody else can see and as the novel progresses she starts to think that maybe she can see them so clearly because she has in fact become one of them. That's the only explanation she can come up with for why all the live inhabitants and visitors to the House act as if she isn't there. The only problem she has is that she can't remember ever dying.

And that sets her off on her search to find out what happened. On the way she meets an assortment of helpful and distinctly unhelpful ghosts, falls in love with a living boy, Kyle, and with his help takes on the might and venom of the witch in the House cellar. Now, that all makes for an impressively eerie and spine chilling ghost story and one that has you struggling all the way to the end wondering how the author is going to bring that ghost-human love story to a successful conclusion.

But this is not just a ghost story. There is a whole cast of assorted live Chance relations, all of whom seem to have motives for killing off Eva, her grandad, and anyone else who might get in the way so that they can get their hands on the House. There's also a rather androgynous house agent, Kyle's sister, their dad and a bunch of pretty incompetent police officers. Oh, and a couple of murders and attempted murders too. All of which means that the story is as much a mystery as it is a ghost story, and as such it trots along at a pretty pace and keeps you guessing right to the end.

I won't give away the ending, that wouldn't be fair, but I will say that, for me, it didn't quite live up to everything that came before. The witch was such a wonderful creation, depicted with real menace, so I think I found her demise a bit of a disappointment, and as to the resolution of the mystery, well, it just stretched this reader's imagination a bit too far.

Having said that, this is a fantastic foray into young adult fiction, There are some truly scary bits and some wonderfully atmospheric writing. And as an example of gothic it introduces a raft of interesting new ideas which certainly enrich the genre.

The lovely folk at Oxford sent me this review copy. If you want one of your own please order it via the link below and then Amazon will make a contribution to maintaining this blog.

 

OUP Dark Fantasy Event

On the evening of Wednesday 27^th October Oxford University Press hosted a Dark Fantasy event in The Drawing Room of the House of St Barnabas in Soho. The purple uplighting, chandeliers, and mirrors of the room were complemented by a liberal scattering of carved pumpkins, not to mention a furry spider and a rather wonderful Venetian mask. Where better to gather for an evening of literary chat and spooky readings?

William Hussey, complete with large and distinctly hirsute spider adorning his left shoulder, opened the readings with an excerpt from Gallows at Twilight, the second book of his Witchfinder trilogy, out on 6^th January 2011. His relish in describing the Crowden sisters feasting on children reassured us that the stomach churning gore and shudder fest of the first book will be continuing in the second, right down to something he tantalisingly described as the ‘infamous shopping-bag line’!

Rhiannon Lassiter came next with a reading from Ghost of a Chance, also out on 6^th January. Rhiannon came to the event with a large supporting cast, including her august mother, Mary Hoffman, sporting the be-feathered mask previously mentioned.  Rhiannon came to dark teen fantasy via science fiction, magic realism and thrillers and it was clear that all had played a role in shaping this book. There were shudders aplenty in this reading: definitely not one for the faint-hearted.

Joss Stirling completed the evening’s readings, with an excerpt from Finding Sky, her first novel in this persona  and published earlier in October. Dressed in a sparkly black dress she more than looked the part and opened her talk with a brief discussion of her theory that the English are prone to periodic bursts of the gothic (or should that be gothick given the historical nature of the discussion?)  The book was written with a very specific teenage girl audience in mind, and several had come along to the event to vouchsafe their approval.  The reading gave more than a glimpse of the nature of the book: psycho-horror underpinned by the humour inherent in an Anglo-American culture clash. Sadly we didn’t get a glimpse of what Joss described as her deep hatred of Las Vegas in the reading but I am assured that we will find it in the novel!

This was an exhilarating event that gave a suitably murky teaser to some very dark books.