That's why the arrival of a ghost, however frightening and demanding, might actually constitute an exciting upgrade of your life.

For a brief while.

When we first meet our adolescent narrator, he's coping pretty well. Adam's found some solace in running track for his high school. He can ignore the taunts of his older pothead brother, Andy, and the marital battles of his parents. And he's newly befriended a computer-savvy loner named Jamie. It seems as if Adam might be able to cope till maturity rescues him.

But then Jamie's abducted and murdered. His corpse is found near the railroad tracks by Gracie Highsmith, a mineral-hunting punk girl whom Adam finds rather intriguing. Amid his sense of loss and violation, Adam begins to focus on Gracie and the rumor that she can see Jamie's ghost. When Adam meets Jamie's spirit himself—along with that of another local ghost named Frances—the bond between Gracie and Adam is solidified.

But Jamie's ghost is a parasite. Not meaning harm, it nonetheless is going to drag Adam down, through the eerie "dead spaces" where the "men with no skin" live. Gracie manages to escape the same threat by literally refusing through an act of will to see Jamie anymore. But Adam can't resist maintaining his old friendship beyond the grave.

Adam's life, already precarious, begins to spiral downward. Gracie offers support and love, up to and including stealing money and attempting to run away with him to California.

But the two teens will soon discover that escaping the dead isn't as easy as simply getting into a car and driving away.

A Bradburyesque novel of growing up weird

Something about the notion of ghosts is eternally powerful. No matter how many bad horror novels and lousy films invoke them, they remain a potent trope, symbolizing so much. I suppose that as long as mankind remains mortal, ghosts will continue to hold sway over us.

Surely the current era is a renaissance of ghostly tales. The work of Peter Beagle and Tim Powers and James Blaylock and Charles de Lint launched the new golden age of ghost stories. And more recently we've had excellent offerings from Graham Joyce, Joe Hill and Sean Stewart. Now up to the plate steps newcomer Christopher Barzak with his debut novel, a strong contender to join the ranks of these classics.

Barzak has made an impact with many stories in various venues, and he's part of a new generation of writers coming at the genre with an "interstitial" or "slipstream" perspective that blends the fantastical with the mimetic. So it's no surprise to find his debut novel well crafted, sensitive and literary, as well as suitably pulpy in places.

In a sense, this is the very path taken by the grandfather of such writing, Ray Bradbury, who long ago elevated what might have been "mere" Weird Tales material into high art.

Certainly Barzak's Midwest setting and juvenile protagonist will summon up echoes of Bradbury's Dandelion Wine (1957) conflated with some of Bradbury's more gothic and gruesome excursions. But at the same time, Barzak explicitly models his book on Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye (1951). Generally, this fusion of influences works quite well, with the spooky bits and the mimetic bits holding equal sway.

Adam's voice, necessarily omnipresent, hooks the reader easily and strongly. His perspective on life is genuinely that of an intelligent maladjusted teen, and his partner Gracie comes across as utterly believable as well. The segues from their mundane issues to the life-or-death supernaturalism is flawless. The reader truly aches for Adam and empathizes closely with his messed-up stumbling toward grace (allusion to his girlfriend's name fully intentional, by me and by Barzak).

The one flaw I see in the book—and this might be chalked up to attempts at realism—is the back-and-forth plotting, the herky-jerky nature of Adam's progress toward the climax. There are aborted movements to freedom that recapitulate each other, crises that mirror or replicate other crises, and so on. Progress in relationships and action is not missing by any means, but it's a stuttering movement. True, this stuttering emulates a teenager's indecisiveness. But sometimes a thriller—and ghost stories are meant to be thrilling—needs a more propulsive flow.