Blog Tour Review: Ghoster by Jason Arnopp

Before I dive into Ghoster , let me extend my thanks to Tracy Fenton of Compulsive Readers and Orbit books for inviting me on the tour…

Wow! Well I’ve literally just finished Ghoster and I have to say my mind is blown!

I’m not really sure where to start…

Firstly Ghoster definitely defies all attempts to fit it neatly into a genre. I started out reading this thinking I was heading into a thriller… half way through I thought I was wrapped up in a ghost story…and by the end I wasn’t really sure where I had been taken!!!

This is a book which thrives on the unexpected and the confusion it creates. It takes the reader down a whole warren of rabbit holes, pushing back the boundaries of both reality and fiction.

When paramedic Kate Collins meets Scott Palmer she believes she has met the man of her dreams. After a whirl wind long distance romance she packs up her life in Leeds to move in with him on the south coast.

Only problem is that when Kate arrives she finds Scott has disappeared. His flat is empty and the only sign of life is Scott’s abandoned smart phone.

And so begins Kate’s desperate quest to discover what has happened to Scott. At first she believes she has been unceremoniously dumped, and it is hurt and anger that motivate her actions. But when unexplained phone calls, noises and damage in the flat begin to escalate, her fury begins to turn to concern and ultimately fear.

Hacking into Scott’s phone seems the logical thing to do but for Kate it is dangerous on so many levels. Prior to her meeting Scott Kate had a serious social media addiction, one that proved to have dire consequences for her paramedic partner and best friend Izzy. By entering Scott’s digital world Kate is reopening old wounds and breaking her own digital detox.

And the more she reveals the more sinister and, frankly down right weird the situation becomes. Nothing is what it seems and there are forces at play that no one seems to understand.

This novel is unlike anything else I have read this year. As I mentioned in my intro it defies classification. I wanted to write my review as near to finishing it as I could, quite simply because I felt that was the best way of putting in to words a true reaction.

Kate is definitely a troubled soul, as is Scott and other characters in the novel. At the heart of their problems is an over reliance on the virtual world and an addiction to online connections. There is certainly a warning within these pages about the danger of excessive internet use, of shunning reality in pursuit of some Instagram perfection.

But is that the whole story? I feel not, but putting my finger on what I am missing feels very tricky. There is no point I pretending that this novel is straightforward. It’s not!

I suspect that for every person that reads it, each will find a different perspective, a different message and a different interpretation of that very unique ending.

Certainly a novel to make to you think!