Vintage: A Ghost Story

Steve Berman

Completed 2/23/2018, reviewed 2/23/2018

4 stars

This was an excellent ghost story.  Talk about subgenre!  It’s LGBTQ YA horror.  This book was nominated for the Andre Norton Award for YA SF/Fantasy/Horror and the Gaylactic Spectrum Award for positive LGBTQ images in SF/Fantasy/Horror.  It’s deserving of its accolades.  It covers realistic topics such as self-acceptance, parental disapproval, and early love experiences while couched in an exciting ghost story.  I was engrossed in it from the start.

The basic plot is that the narrator, who I think is never named, has run away from home and is living with his aunt.  He’s a gay goth kid whose best friend is a girl, Trace, who has a fascination with the supernatural.  Their favorite pastime is going to other people’s funerals.  One night, the narrator makes contact with the ghost of a teen boy who was killed in a car crash in the late ‘50s.  The ghost falls in love with him.  Soon what seemed to be an exciting supernatural relationship becomes a dangerous matter of jealousy and fear. 

The plot is both really fun and serious, and the situations very realistic.  The narrator has run away because his parents basically kicked him out of the house for being gay.  He’s afraid to come out to the aunt he’s staying with, so he’s only out to Trace and a few of her friends, including a young lesbian couple whose relationship seems pretty shaky.  He’s dropped out of school and is working at a vintage clothing shop. 

The characters are well-developed for such a short book, clocking in at only 204 pages.  I felt pretty deeply for the narrator and his plight.  I could relate to his constant second-guessing himself and his decisions.  Even Josh is well-drawn for being a ghost. 

If there’s anything negative to say about the book, it’s that it could have been longer.  While in some ways, it was good to get on with the story, I thought that the relationship with Josh the ghost could have been drawn out longer.  It jumps fairly quickly from being exciting to terrifying.  I would have liked to have seen it played out a little more subtly in the middle.  I would also have liked to have seen a little more development of the lesbian characters.  They come on the scene fairly quickly and before you know it, they’re having fights. 

Still I found the book quite satisfying.  It’s not really that scary, but it is creepy.  The author does an excellent job of setting tone.  He’s an editor of a lot of anthologies of LGBTQ genre fiction, as well as author of many short stories of various creepiness.  I would definitely read other works by him.  I give the book four out of five stars.