This novel is making me feel terrible in a way that I don't like or need right now. Probably will finish it later, because I love Night Film. Left off on page 143.

Another memoir on audio, because memoirs on audio have just become my thing for 2020. I wasn't familiar with Bell's work before reading this, but I checked it out because it has a charmingly long title and because I'm trying to be more conscious of how white my reading is and to do something about it. While Bell and I don't necessarily share interests in a way that would make reading about stand-up or Denzel Washington movies as engaging to me as to other hypothetical readers, I did enjoy this book a lot. Bell has a wry and no-nonsense literary voice that he lends well to topics such as growing up with ambitious parents (including a mom whose research and marketing skills sound legendary), the importance of inclusive workplaces and creative environments, and being in an interracial marriage and parenting biracial children.

This book is deeply weird, folksy, some kind of Gothic that seems Southern but I'm honestly not sure. It fits squarely into my creepy summer books wheelhouse.

It truly felt as though this book got slightly longer as I turned each page, but I so desperately want to know what happens next. I’m not sure of the last time I finished a book this exhausted for a character.

I really love spooky nostalgia and the horrors of childhood, and that’s the territory in which The Saturday Night Ghost Club roams by bike and by skateboard. There’s something of Stephen King here, through a Canadian lens and with less of King’s unrelenting cruelty. This book doesn’t go as dark as it could have, and I found myself grateful for the victories the characters are allowed to win. Sometimes it’s just nice to read a slightly softer, horror-adjacent book like this one.