******Spoiler alert **********

Hmm kinda hard to rate this one......I wouldn't consider this a horror novel. In the town of Merridale, the mysterious blue transparent figures of dead citizens suddenly appear. Ghosts?? No one knows and the book never explains. They do not appear to have any meaning, and end up being just backdrops, to both the town and the novel itself.

The story focuses on a the town as a whole , but mostly a few key characters. There's some psychological stuff going on here, and alot of delving into the past of characters. The synopsis suggest that "all hell will break loose".....I kept waiting for this, or at least something, to happen. The one character that you think may end up playing a part in the climax and explanation of events.....Eddie, a man whom has always sworn to see and hear the dead residents of Merridale......is later implied to be a fraud.

The writing isn't bad....the story isn't bad....its just not what I expected. I think going in with the correct expectations may have changed my overall opinion of the book. ( )

Death. This novel is about death. Not just what happens after but how death affects the living, the before. This shouldn't be anything surprising though considering the story is about the dead returning as ghosts.

Specifically, overnight the town of Merridale has semi-transparent blue apparitions appear; these are 3D snapshots of the last moment of the dead. Sometimes appearing at their place of death; sometimes they are at someplace important to their lives. And while the dead don't cause any physical harm, the mental fatigue is significant. Jim Callender who lost his son in a school bus accident sinks into a guilty depression; Brad Meyers who lost his son in the same accident has his rage go from a simmer to a boil. Some come back to try to get closure while others run to get away from what they fear. Either way, the spirits have a lasting affect on the town.

Getting back to death though, while near the end of the book Williamson does an excellent job of dwelling on the impact of death, the point him me much sooner. Jim was telling his back story and what happened to Terry, his son. I was actually thinking that the novel was moving slow, that for a novel about ghosts returning to town as blue, hovering spirits that we were spending very little time on those ghosts. Then Jim's story sunk into me and I was floored. The book turned from a slow moving story to something that left me wondering and thinking and near tears. That was the point where I realized that the characters were complex with good and bad, that they had their issues to work through, that they were real. From that point on, I could hardly put the book down. Not because it was a page-turner full of excitement but because I had to know what was going to happen. I had to know how people were going to deal with the impact of the ghosts. Needless to say, the book is highly recommended. ( )