Book review: The Saturday Night Ghost Club

The Saturday Night Ghost Club by Craig Davidson

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

The Saturday Night Ghost Club is, more than anything, a story about growing up and making the transition away from childhood, leaving behind the magical and fantastic and trading them in for the everyday and mundane, and accepting that not everything in the world is good, that life can be arbitrary and unfair, but that the journey is still one filled with wonders and the love of others.

Jake Baker is a 12-year-old boy living with his parents in Niagara Falls, also known as “Cataract City” because of how it never changes, how its old buildings are left to stand as relics and skeletons instead of being torn down to be replaced with newer edifices. During the summer Jake becomes friends with the kids of a new family in town, the Yellowtails. Billy is quiet and rocksteady, while his older sister Dove is revealed to be grappling with unspecified mental issues that make her “larger than life.” She gets most of the best lines in the story as a result.

The core of the story revolves around Jake’s Uncle Calvin, a seemingly lovable eccentric who peddles strange wares at his store, The Occultarium. Calvin believes in ghosts and other sundry weird things, and shares stories of the macabre with Jake–who is afraid of nearly everything–culminating in the formation of The Saturday Night Ghost Club, in which a small group, led by Calvin, are given tours of local haunts.

As it becomes clearer than there is more to Uncle Calvin than meets the eye, the story turns from sweet to bittersweet, becoming a reminisce tinged with sadness, but with hope or at least the possibility of hope never far off.

Davidson writes with a kind of spare gentleness, the prose painting the scenes with quick metaphors; interjections from Jake–the story’s narrator–never feel like the voice of the writer intruding, but rather the earnest reflections of someone who has yearned to tell this story.

The villain of the piece, a budding young sociopath named Percy, feels somewhat stock and perhaps a bit unnecessary, but Davidson uses him to draw out the growth of Jake. It just seems like these kinds of stories about growing up must always have a Bully who is overcome.

Overall, though, this was a short but enjoyable ride, even without the “twist” at the end, a pleasant enough look at growing up in a town where tragedy can lay just a step away.

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Daily Drawing No. 33: (Bad news) Bear

Here’s my finished bear sketch, which I don’t care for. The color is weird because I didn’t use reference, so I just winged it and the grass is odd because I was experimenting with shadows/textures. Also, the bear is magically standing on top of the grass instead of in it. I probably should have fixed that, but it was getting late.

I also wasn’t sure how to shade the bear, so it is mostly flat, but with some texture. Kind of a mess. But I did it!

#makingarteveryday

Daily Drawing No. 32: Bear sketch

I’m not sure how many of these I’ll do. The Making Art Everyday prompts for February are animals, which is fine. I’ll draw a penguin. But the parameters have shifted from just doing something every day to something more tutorial-like, which is not what I want. I am not making these sketches to learn, per se, I’m doing them to build a habit for drawing every day. Any learning that may happen alongside them is incidental–I plan on continuing my actual learning in structured lessons elsewhere.

Here’s how this week’s prompts work:

This week is all about teaching yourself how to draw something from memory. The idea here is to study an animal, identify its unique characteristics, break it down into simple shapes, then develop your own method for drawing that animal. It’s a process that can take time, so I’ve split each prompt across two days.

This is WAY too specific for a daily prompt and splitting it over two days makes it…not daily.

So I cheated and did a bear sketch from reference. It turned out decent.

#makingarteveryday

January 2021 weight loss report: Up 2.4 pounds

It’s a new year but the same old fat.

I started January with good intentions, but the combination of plantar fasciitis (keeping me from running or even walking very often) and a lot of unstructured free time took its toll.

Specifically, it made me fat. I gave up and gave in and while I remain donut-free, I indulged in the worst sort of cookiepalooza. I ate boxes of them. Boxes!

The results are not surprising.

However, I’ve thought of this as the beginning of a purge, in which I will do the following:

  • No more snacking (healthy snacks like bananas are OK)
  • No more soda or carbonated beverages. This includes diet soda, which I think is just making me feel gross. Back to good old water and the occasional sugar-free Gatorade or glass of milk.

We’ll see if I can stick to this. I really have no excuse not to, but that hasn’t stopped me before.

I’m also going to try keeping a daily journal (not on the blog here) to see if that helps keep me honest or honest-like or even honest adjacent.

But let’s stop avoiding the subject and consider the following. After being up a bit in December, I am up quite a bit more this month, topping out today at 176.6 pounds.

I was 174.2 pounds on January 1st, meaning I am up 2.4 pounds for the year to date.

Ugh.

Here’s to a hopefully slimmer 2021.

Stats:

January 1: 174.2 pounds
January 31: 176.6 pounds (up 2.4 pounds)

Year to date: From 174.2 to 176.6 pounds (up 2.4 pounds)

And the body fat:

January 1: 22.4% (39.1 pounds of fat)
January 31: 22.1% (39 pounds of fat) (down 0.1 pound)

Daily Drawing No. 29: Your favorite beverage

Chocolate milk, because why not?

I spent a long time trying to get the perspective of the carton right and realized after that I had ignored everything I’ve learned about horizon lines and all that jazz. It doesn’t look too dopey, at least.

I’m not sure why I added gum gum people, but I think they add a certain something.

#makingarteveryday

Drawing a Day, Day 28: Your favorite meal

I chose pizza even though I’ve already done pizza. I was originally going to do a pizza sitting in a shaft of light on a stone pedestal, then realized that’s way beyond my current skill level, so I just did it against a glowy background instead.

I was going to make the pepperoni more 3Dish but couldn’t get it to look right.

#makingarteveryday