Listen to the First Chapter:
From the Book Jacket:
Cas Lowood has inherited an unusual vocation: He kills the dead.
So did his father before him, until he was gruesomely murdered by a ghost he sought to kill. Now, armed with his father's mysterious and deadly athame, Cas travels the country with his kitchen-witch mother and their spirit-sniffing cat. They follow legends and local lore, destroy the murderous dead, and keep pesky things like the future and friends at bay.
Searching for a ghost the locals call Anna Dressed in Blood, Cas expects the usual: track, hunt, kill. What he finds instead is a girl entangled in curses and rage, a ghost like he's never faced before. She still wears the dress she wore on the day of her brutal murder in 1958: once white, now stained red and dripping with blood. Since her death, Anna has killed any and every person who has dared to step into the deserted Victorian she used to call home.
But she, for whatever reason, spares his life.
Reviews:
Life can get tough for a boy who kills ghosts.
Teeth-chattering suspense and suppressed chuckles might attack readers in this superior black comedy/adventure. Theseus Cassio Lowood has inherited his father’s athame, a magical knife that can slice and dice ghosts to bits. He only kills ghosts who kill humans, but plenty of those lurk everywhere, forcing Cas and his white-witch mother to move constantly. When he answers a call to dispatch Anna, a ghost that’s brutally dismembered dozens of ill-fated folks who stepped into her house, for the first time Cas makes some friends. These help him until one steals the athame, an unfortunate choice. Meanwhile, Cas learns that Anna won’t kill him, so he enlists her aid in tracking down the voodoo spirit that literally ate his father. Blake populates the story with a nice mixture of personalities, including Anna, and spices it with plenty of gallows humor, all the while keeping the suspense pounding. The comedy works even better when juxtaposed against serious suspense, as Cas quips such lines as “I hate it when they don’t have eyes.” Matter-of-fact Anna leavens the comedy even as the suspense boils into terror. (Don't go in the basement.)
Abundantly original, marvelously inventive and enormous fun, this can stand alongside the best horror fiction out there. We demand sequels.
-- Kirkus Reviews
Effectively blending horror and romance, Blake (Sleepwalk Society) delivers an exciting and witty gothic ghost story. Seventeen-year-old loner Cas follows in his late father’s footsteps, hunting down vengeful ghosts and dispatching them before they can hurt more people. He and his mother (a witch) move from town to town, and his latest target is the titular Anna, a 16-year-old girl killed on the way to a dance in Thunder Bay, Ont., in 1958. When the ghost eviscerates a local in front of Cas, he realizes it will be a much harder struggle than previously anticipated, joining forces with psychic Thomas and popular girl Carmel to discover Anna’s history and attempt to free her from her curse without destroying her. Blake occasionally gets too cute—naming a character “Will Rosenberg” in a story in which characters are aware of Buffy is pushing things, as is the notion that today’s small-town teens are all Rules of Attraction. But the pop culture references are generally sharp (Ghostbusters references make for an effective running gag) and on point, and the result is an enjoyable horror tale. -- Publishers Weekly
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