Raven's Rest by Stephen Osborne

[Ulysses]

Raven’s Rest
By Stephen Osborne
Dreamspinner press, 2016
Cover by Anna Sikorska
ISBN: 9781634777001
Four stars

Not every prince charming rides in on a white horse. Sometimes he’s a slacker with a guitar and an attitude.

Romantic ghost stories appeal to me. Maybe that’s because I yearn for there to be an afterlife where we’ll see those we’ve loved and lost. Stephen Osborne has created a spookily lovely ghost story/romance involving two slightly lost young men and two even more terribly lost ghosts.

I have to point out that, if the ghosts weren’t ghosts, they’d be my age.

Michael Cook is a young adult, fleeing an abusive relationship to find not just peace, but himself, in a small town in Illinois. He stumbles on an historic inn with an Edgar Alan Poe theme, and also stumbles onto the ghost of a young man, Coleman Hollis, who seems to recognize him.

Chance takes Michael to the local diner, where he meets Trey Ramsay, son of the owner and an undirected young man who hides his gentle soul behind a faux-badass façade. Together Michael and Trey begin to confront themselves, each other, and the dawning reality of the Raven’s Rest ghosts.

Ultimately the story is about community and self-respect; about how people need each other as well as their independence. Osborne writes very nicely, and creates a world full of believable people who care about each other, and thus about whom we, too, can care.