BEYOND

Jane’s shadow having its own spirit is odd enough. Now it has a death wish.

Born without a pulse, Jane is no stranger to near-death experiences. Her shadow has forced her to drink drain cleaner and held her down on a train track as a speeding train approached. After a recent nail-gun “accident” to the skull causes her to flat-line, Jane returns to the living with her shadow even more determined to kill her. The first-person narration makes the teen’s fear immediate, as she begins sleepwalking along dangerous roads and dreaming of being buried alive. The atmospheric setting—the dark, wet, small town of Edgewood, along Canada’s Rain Coast—adds another layer of terror to this intriguing ghost story. When Jane discovers a human skeleton after a landslide, she starts to realize the true nature of her shadow. Certain her constable father and florist mother wouldn’t believe her shadow stories, she entrusts best friend and “Creep Sister” Lexi, a budding cinematographer with an interest in film noir, to help her solve the mystery.

As in Acceleration (2003) and Bonechiller (2008), McNamee delivers another taut, spine-tingling page turner. A return to the true ghost story without any supernatural romance to ruin it.