Ghostlight

Teenage Gabriel Vasilakis is working a summer job giving “ghost tours” of an abandoned lighthouse in the Toronto Islands amusement park when he encounters a real ghost, that of Rebecca Strand who died with her lighthouse keeper father in the 1830s at the hands of Nicholas Viker, a villain ghost whose mission is to wreak havoc upon the living world. Learning from Rebecca that her father was attempting to defeat Viker with a rare “ghostlight” lens attached to the lighthouse beam, Gabe and his friends, Yuri and Callie, embark on a quest to locate the ghostlight to rescue Keeper Strand’s ghost and prevent a newly strengthened Viker from destroying Toronto. Chasing the fate of the artifact through historical Toronto, and with the help of homemade light beams, the trio eventually defeat Viker and his ghost army at the top of the CN Tower, allowing Rebecca and her father to go in peace to the afterlife and saving Toronto from chaos.

Oppel is the master of fantastical stories set in real-life settings with characters that behave according to human nature. Here, he weaves a supernatural world where the dead haunt the setting of their deaths until they resolve their living torment, in this case the unsolved deaths of the Strands and Viker’s “swallowing” of Keeper Strand’s ghost to increase his own strength. The dead are invisible to the living until they “clasp” their hands to a sympathetic person, gaining some strength and leaving the living person tired and cold. The mythical setting is joined to the real world in ways that are realistically emotional, nowhere more vivid than in Gabe’s encounter with the ghost of his estranged father, recently killed in a distracted-pedestrian accident. The characters of ghost-blogger Callie and engineering-whiz Yuri are well-developed, as is the sympathy developed for Yuri’s family as they consider moving back to their native Russia because of their inability to be certified in their professions in Canada.

The reader’s suspension of disbelief needs to be absolute for the story to be effective, and, on occasion, that disbelief bubbles to the surface. A few inconsistencies in the fictional ghost world and the ability of the ghostlight to make ghosts visible occasionally get in the way, and the sudden appearance of the concept of the “ghastlight”—a shattered lens that strengthens ghosts instead of weakening them—does seem to stretch the supernatural world believability. Yet the torment of the unjustly departed is vivid and occasionally humorous, as is the encounter with characters from Toronto’s past, in particular the teens’ alliance with the ghost of (historical) journalist George Brown and (fictional) Indigenous leader Joseph Halfday, especially when the two acknowledge their disagreement over the legacy of colonialism (although why a real Indigenous leader was not chosen to make an appearance is a bit confusing). In the end, Ghostlight is a solid addition to a middle-grade fantasy library.