Ghostlight
-
- $9.99
Publisher Description
Gabe’s summer job scaring tourists with ghost stories turns terrifyingly real when he accidentally summons the spirit of a dead girl—and must join forces with her to protect the world of the living. A new story by award-winning author Ken Oppel for ages 10 and up.
The story of the tragic death of sixteen-year-old Rebecca Strand and her lighthouse keeper father is just an elaborate tale Gabe tells tourists for his summer job on Toronto Island. Or so he thought.
When his ghost tours awaken Rebecca’s spirit, Gabe is drawn into a world far darker than any ghost story he’s ever heard. Rebecca reveals that she and her father were connected to the Order, a secret society devoted to protecting the world from "the wakeful and wicked dead"—malevolent spirits like Viker, the ghost responsible for their deaths. But now the Order has disappeared and Viker is growing even stronger, and he’ll stop at nothing to wreak chaos and destruction on the living.
Gabe and his friends—both living and dead—must find a way to stop Viker before they all become lost souls.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Ghostbusters meets Stranger Things in Oppel's (Bloom) perceptive supernatural thriller. Despite his summer job giving ghost tours of Toronto's historic Gibraltar Point Lighthouse, Greek-cued teen Gabe Vasilakis—who's grieving the death of his largely absent father—harbors a deep skepticism about the otherworldly until he inadvertently wakes the ghost of 16-year-old Rebecca Strand, who died in 1839. Rebecca was the daughter of a lighthouse keeper who, as part of a secret order, also warded the ghostlight, a mythical amber lens used to "protect the living from the wakeful and wicked dead." His summer vacation ruined and perception overturned, Gabe is saddled with the knowledge that his hometown is crawling with specters, including the driven spirit of Rebecca's murderer: powerful, human-devouring Nicholas Viker, who means to find the missing ghostlight and employ its terrible power. Alongside friends Yuri, a Russian-born inventor, and Callie, an intrepid ghost blogger of Goan descent, and working with historical ghosts, including Mississauga allies, Gabe must revisit clues buried in Toronto's history before Viker gets his way. Blending frights, mystery elements, and a tender relationship, the story conjures considerable tension and a deep sense of place as it overlays Canadian history and the paranormal atop a feverish plot. Characters largely read as white. Ages 10–up.
