Paranormal is a big word, a controversial word, if you will. There are believers and there are non-believers. Me? I am a believer pur sang. I dig the fact that there is more to this world than meets the eye. So when my friend E.D. led me to Lish McBride’s Hold Me Closer, Necromancer, I felt no objections reading it. Good choice! 

It grabbed me right away or rather Sam LaCroix grabbed me, not in the least because his full name is Samhain Corvux LaCroix. A guy named after my favorite bird? That bode well. 

 

Anyway, about the book: Sam LaCroix is a Seattle college dropout and now flips burgers at a local fast food joint. While playing a game of potato hockey in the diner’s parking lot with his friends Ramon, Frank and Brooke, they break the taillight of a shiny classic car. The owner of the car, an old guy named Douglas Montgomery, isn’t amused. 

Until he sets eye on Sam. 

 

From that moment on danger lingers in the air. Soon after Brooke’s head and a message from Douglas gets delivered at Sam’s doorstep, in a brown paper bag, tied with a string. Sam finds out he is a necromancer, just like Douglas who sees Sam as a threat to his lucrative business of raising the dead. Douglas wants Sam to team up with him. If he refuses, Douglas will send him another message. Sam has only a week to figure out how to escape this nightmare.

 

Lish McBride has a smooth pen and an entertaining one to boot. She has written a story that is both spine-chilling and filled with the sarcastic wit so characteristic of young adults. Unnoticed and together with Sam and his friends Hold Me Closer, Necromancer slips you into a world of necromancers and wiccans, gnomes and harbingers, werewolves, and Brid, a beautiful girl, and her brothers who happen to be werehounds. 

 

Chapters start with a quote from a song lyric, quotes that shed a whole different light on those songs and when McBride lets Douglas hint that one of the Stones was raised from the dead (Mick? Keith?), you know that a brown paper bag tied with a string will never ever be one of your favorite things again.

 

 

text by Mina Witteman / Photo by Misato Nagare