Johnny Maxwell 02 – Johnny and the Dead

Terry Pratchett's Johnny and the Dead is a funny ghost story for 9 year olds about a boy who starts seeing the people in the cemetery, and finds they would like a word.

What happens

Nobody is sure why Johnny can see them. The Alderman reckons it's because he's too lazy not to. Wobbler, who is technically his best friend, says it's because he's mental. Yo-less, who reads medical books, thinks Johnny just can't filter things out the way everyone else does, so he opens his eyes in the morning and the whole universe hits him in the face.

Wobbler says that still sounds like mental to him.

Johnny has started walking home through the old cemetery because it halves the journey. He was rather hoping it would be spookier. Mostly it's birds and foxes and traffic a long way off, and stone angels, one of whom looks like he's just remembered he should have gone to the loo before leaving heaven.

Then Wobbler mentions that the Council has sold the whole place to a big company for fivepence, because it was costing too much to keep. It's going to be offices.

"I'd have given them at least a pound," says Johnny.

And that's the book. The dead have strong views about being built on, and the only living person who can hear them is Johnny.

The jokes are proper Pratchett. Wobbler explaining that dead people always lurch, and Johnny wanting to know why, when living people manage perfectly well with doors. A long discussion about whether witches go abroad at Halloween and whether they get good out-of-season deals. Mr Vicenti insisting he was never in the Mafia, only a wholesale novelty salesman and amateur escapologist, which he points out is very nearly the same thing as not being in the Mafia.

Something quieter is going on underneath all that. Johnny is living at his grandad's because things at home went through the shouting and then the Being Sensible About Things, and his dad is taking a job on the other side of the country. Johnny mostly tries not to think about it. The book lets him.

A word before you hand it over, though. It is a book set in a cemetery. The dead discuss being dead quite matter-of-factly, and they give you their dates as they go, so the Alderman arrives with 1822 to 1906 attached to him. Nothing gory, nothing jump-out-at-you. But a child who finds the plain fact of dying hard to sit with will be sitting with it for a whole book.

What to read next

If the idea of ghosts having rights appeals, Rise of the Ghostfather has two boys in a secret ghost-hunting outfit arguing that a headless Elizabethan gentleman deserves better treatment than he's getting.