“Well, it sounded like the scream came from down here… Right, let’s look upstairs.”

44. Episode Thirteen – Craig Di Louie

Fade to Black is a pretty good name for a ghost hunting show, I will say. And I do love a good “paranormal experiments in the 1970s have long reaching effects” sort of story. So I am essentially the audience for Episode Thirteen. I sometimes don’t like when stories are epistolary as I have had some recent experience with that not reading as quickly as I would like and I really dislike text messages represented in books because it reminds me of the downfall of comprehensible spelling and grammar that I see on a regular basis. Capitalizing words does not mean you have some sort of anger, it means you know how to write formally and maybe, just maybe, don’t know how to write as informally as someone born after the internet was in homes across this great land.

Anyway, I sound like one of the characters, the cop, who is older than me if he was a cop in the 1980s. But, he was also the only part of the ghost hunting group who understood the references the ghosts of the 1972 paranormal research group were making, songs and phrases and a reference to the long running Tootsie Pop commercial with the impatient owl. Kevin, as the cop is named, certainly has a lot of downsides represented, but he was useful because a bridge between generations always is.

The main couple of the ghost hunting group are Matt, who totally believes, and Claire, a red head who totally doesn’t and is super into physics. She wants out and this show might be crumbling and she doesn’t want to tell her husband, so they have drama.

The other two people experiencing the ghosties are an actress who has been placed with the group but is apparently a very good addition, and she’s the only truly rational person once things go to shit in the house and everybody gets super scared. She runs away. Smart. She knows how much she is pretending to be interested in communicating with ghosts. Of course, she also comes back, but, that initial running was the smartest character move in the story. There’s also the camera man who calls himself a “Techno Viking” based on his tattoos and tech savvy. Okey-dokey then. He, like many who stay behind cameras, considers himself an observer and detached from what’s in front of him, but that doesn’t prevent him from being totally frightened when an apparition looks directly at him.

And that apparition is described in a super creepy way. I didn’t find most of the book scary, per se, but I did not like the description of that apparition and after reading this in two sittings, one of which was when I encountered all of the action, I found it unsettling. Just a general sense of unease and really being uncomfortable with the idea of an apparition making direct eye contact, especially while smiling. That’s creepy shit.

I did enjoy reading the files of the group doing experiments, although they were minimally included. To me, having the files and home videos were a big part of what makes the investigation special and so I guess I wanted to spend more time with what Claire’s character was doing. Although we do find out in the end that one of the authors of the files didn’t actually “make it to the end” and so I don’t get why she was authoring anything if she wasn’t actually all done with the program that no one knew they were entering when they came to the house, this of course does not make sense until you get to one of the twists in the story.

Overall this was very worth reading and went very quickly and is not so much terrifying as it is unsettling, like when you know a frequency exists that makes you feel like someone is watching you.

 

Thankfully my own ghost hunting couple, Thaddeus and Pammy, have never had to worry about super creepy smiling apparitions making direct eye contact.