O'Nan (Wish You Were Here, 2001, etc.), who's made a career exploring the dark side, welcomes Halloween with a "ghost story" that soars when the supernatural lets good old-fashioned character take center stage. In a small Connecticut town on October 31, a night that traditionally culminates in soaped windows, tossed eggs, and bellyaches from too much candy, a group of carousing high-schoolers are laid waste in a car accident. Three die and two live: one seemingly intact, the other severely brain-damaged. A year later, as the exact moment the careening car got wrapped around a tree approaches again, the ghosts of the dead teenagers return to haunt--and observe--the living. Narrated by the ghost of Marco, the self-proclaimed "quiet one," we meet fellow ghost Danielle (girlfriend of Tim, the one who survived intact); ghost Toe, the speeding driver (who secretly loves Danielle, even in death); and those left behind whose lives were horribly altered by the tragedy. Tim, about to graduate high school without his friends, carries the burden of still existing; Brooks, the cop with a secret who was first at the scene is "fifty-three, in debt, alone, a mess"; Kyle, a former pot-smoking rebel who now can barely tie his shoelaces; and Kyle's mother, Nancy, who tends her diminished son and mourns her empty marriage. The mildly malevolent ghosts swirl around and play tricks, but the real trauma comes when we're privy to the thoughts of the living and their attempts to cope with memory and guilt: Nancy making a memorial wreath to hang on the tree; Brooks doggedly tailing Tim in a futile attempt to keep him safe; and Tim, rethinking endlessly his horrible plan to end the pain as the witching hour approaches. A skilled writer, a complex novel, mixed results. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

More poignant than terrifying, this contemporary ghost story set in suburban Connecticut focuses on the survivors of a car accident that killed three teenagers on Halloween exactly a year before the novel begins. Tim escaped without a scratch, but seeks to assuage his survivor's guilt on the first anniversary of the event. Kyle, once a teen rebel, is now a brain-damaged shadow (a kind of zombie) of his former self. Brooks, the townie cop who discovered the accident, watches helplessly as his life skids out of control. And most poignant of all, Nancy Sorensen, Kyle's mother, stoically cares for her damaged son and tries to heal a marriage nearly destroyed by grief. These sad characters are haunted in another way as well, by the ghosts of the three killed instantly in the crash: Marco, Toe and Danielle, who address themselves directly to the reader. "We're on a mission," they say, but their objective is never explicitly stated; they just observe as the day's events unfold. Each character's story is told (and, eventually, woven together) in O'Nan's simple, searching prose, which captures the inchoate passion and longing of teenage life as well as the bleak resignation of middle age. O'Nan demonstrates remarkable restraint; there's no grasping for tragic meaning (the accident was "just something random that happened to us, bad luck," according to Marco) or melodrama. Despite some confusing shifts in time-it's occasionally hard to decipher what's happening now and what happened then-a coherent thesis of misfortune emerges: death has many victims, and the ghosts haunting the survivors don't only appear on Halloween. (Oct.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

The aftermath of a Halloween tragedy haunts a New England town on the one-year anniversary of a typical teen joyride that ended with a car wrapped around a tree. Toe, Marco, and Danielle were instantly killed. Kyle lives on, sort of; a severe brain injury obliterates the rebel in him, the accident leaving him with the mind of a child. Tim, "the lucky one" in the backseat, his arms around Danielle, survived but now has a death wish. Officer Brooks, the first on the scene, was terribly altered by the event, and his life is in shambles. Now, on Halloween, he fears that Tim is going to do something horrible. Travis and Greg, buds of Toe, don't want the day to go by without memorializing their dear departed friends. O'Nan, author of Wish You Were Here BKL F 1 02, tells a ghost story from the point of view of Marco's ghost. Like the narrator of Alice Sebold's The Lovely Bones BKL My 1 02, Marco (along with Danielle and Toe) can witness the lives of those they left behind, see the impact their deaths have had on the community, but have little direct effect on certain inevitabilities--an interesting literary contrivance that doesn't always pay off (see Douglas Coupland's Girlfriend in a Coma (1998) and Hey, Nostradamus BKL My 15 03 for other examples of this vantage point). O'Nan's voice is compelling, his prose lovely and evocative. --Benjamin Segedin Copyright 2003 Booklist

On a New England Halloween night, a car carrying five teenagers crashes into a tree, killing three of them and leaving Kyle brain damaged and Tim guilty over his own survival. Brooks, the policeman investigating the accident, is also haunted by the event, though the reason it has wrecked his life is not immediately apparent. A year later, Brooks, Tim, Kyle, and the ghosts of the victims converge to bring about closure. O'Nan's novel is narrated by Marco, one of the ghosts, and how the other characters cope with loss is seen from the point of view of the dead teens. Despite this gothic element and the Halloween setting, Night Country is not really a horror or fantasy tale but an original approach to examining the banality of suburban American life. Sympathy for the ghosts is intensified by their being condemned to an eternity of that hell known as adolescence; John Tye's reading perfectly captures teenaged angst. Recommended for YA collections.-Michael Adams, CUNY Graduate Ctr. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.