Haunting the Dead

(This review of mine was originally publised in Sequential Tart's Report Card, in November of 2003. http://www.sequentialtart.com/reports.php?ID=2713) Haunting the Dead collects four chilling novellas about Orpheus, an organization in the World of Darkness mythos that investigates paranormal activity. The company has a most intriguing modus operandi -- they "kill" their employees temporarily so that they can do their job as ghosts! In the first story, "The Grass is Always Greener", by Stefan Petrucha, we are deftly introduced to the whole concept through the eyes of Shutty, a suicidal college student who attends a fateful party. Fans of The Sixth Sense and The Others will truly enjoy this tale, which is perhaps the best in an overall great book. The second tale, "Eurydice", by Seth Lindberg, tells the story of an Orpheus employee names Anders, and nicely lays out the workings (and hazards) of the organization as he searches for a lost coworker -- his lover, Lila. And, for those not up on their greek mythology, it explains the origin of the company's name. It also introduces the idea of a special sort of operative known as a "banshee", a concept that is carried over to the last two stories in the book. This tale is a little less horror and a little more sci-fi, with maybe a splash of What Dreams May Come. In the third tale, "Dia De Los Muertos", by Allen Rausch, the concept is given a hispanic flavor as we accompany agent Eileen Savitch and her protege, Teo, on a vist to an Orpheus location in Mexico. Fans of the game Grim Fandango will get a kick out of this story. It seems to follow a different set of rules regarding the state of being a ghost than the other stories in the book, though, which is a little confusing. The fourth and final tale, "Corridors", by Rick Chillot, tells the story of a haunted hotel. It's a complicated peice of work, jumping back and forth in time and location, but it's well worth the effort, so stick with it! Fans of Angel's more involved, chilling episodes, or of The Shining, will find it worthwhile. The nice thing about this book is that it doesn't actually use any of the other World of Darkness concepts, so even readers new to the product line can enjoy it. So if you're a horror fan, don't be afraid to check it out!

Haunting the Dead is a collection of four novellas - all telling tales of the Orpheus Group, an organization (set in White Wolf's World of Darkness, presumably) that deals with ghosts, and employs agents who can either project themselves to the other side or are ghost themselves. "The Grass is Always Greener" by Stefan Petrucha deals with a haunted dormitory and a group of students assembled to take drugs and listen to a mysterious TV broadcast. Or...are they? This one only indirectly deals with Orpheus and from an outsider's viewpoint. "Eurydice" deals with Orpheus full bore, the only one of the four stories to do so, and exposes its corporate bureaucratic underbelly. One agent, Anders, with suicidal tendencies, loses his living girlfriend and has to wonder if life is worth living...when he knows his dead girlfriend's spirit is waiting for him to join him. "Dia de Los Muertos" has an agent and her ghost-partner investigating a haunted construction site and finds an Aztec cult tied into the overall menace threatening Orpheus. (Several Kolchak: Night Stalker in-jokes can be found in this one.) And "Corridors" mixes different times and places within a hotel as a new Orpheus agent/experiment wakes up to find the "big threat" and its minions overrunning the place. All four stories are tied together by the common thread of some big supernatural menace on the other side taking out Orpheus and its agents. As noted above, all four of the stories are a bit open-ended and there's no real resolution at the end. Still, all four of the stories are entertaining and I'd recommend them to those interested in stories of the supernatural guaranteed to keep you flipping the pages.

Interesting, I have to say, though the stories seem to end with little overall resolution. Obviously, the fiction here needs to set up a situation and break it down, leave some loose ends (it is marketing for a role playing product, after all), and some story threads are quite interesting... However, each of the stories only achieves a minor resolution -- though in terms of individual characters, some resolutions resolve character arcs. There is so much left open and unanswered, however, possibly too much. To back up, apparently, there is a Ghostbusters style organization (they even have computer servers named Spengler, Stanz, Zeddemore, etc) dedicated to investigation and resolution of ghostly phenomenon, for a profit. Its agents can -- either through psychic power or scientific motivation -- detach their souls from their bodies. These four novellas explore several aspects of this organization -- both as a threat and a victim. The first novella (Greener on the Other Side) is the story of several youths who get together to drop a new drug and watch a strange, pirate broadcast... A situation that gets pretty ugly after a couple of twists. The second novella (Euridice) involves a widowed agent who discovers that his wife (a psychic Orpheus agent) may have been killed by the very organization they are working for... The third novella (Dia de Los Muertos) finds a rookie and experienced agent answering the highest level of distress call in the newly opened Orpheus branch in Guadalahara. The fourth novella (Corridors) finds a man, who volunteered for a spiritual experiment with the Orpheus group, trapped inside a strange hotel, with its equally strange inhabitants -- both dead and alive. Interesting premises, interesting stories, but they would have been stronger with a more definitive resolutions...

I enjoyed all four of the stories in this book. Some of the things in it did seem to go against certain things in the core rulebook, however. Still, the stories are great, and I strongly recommend it.