Now Entering Addamsville

In this satisfyingly creepy tale, a girl capable of seeing ghosts in a small Indiana town teeming with them risks everything to hunt firestarters, malevolent spirits who possess the living and feed off the dead. Living with her sister in a trailer on the town’s outskirts after her mother disappeared and her father went to jail, Zora Novak, 18, is an outcast. After a disastrous encounter cost her two fingers and gave her a reputation as an arsonist, she turned from hunting firestarters alone to pursuing good deeds. When a new firestarter murders someone and Zora becomes a suspect, she reluctantly investigates, with the help of her cousin Artemis, an expert in the town’s spooky history. Further complicating things, a popular ghost-hunting reality show arrives up to film an episode, and Zora can’t afford for them to get in her way. Now she has to find the most dangerous firestarter of her career, one unexpectedly tied to Addamsville’s most baffling mysteries. Zappia (Eliza and her Monsters) crafts an engaging dark fantasy, expertly weaving together a small-town aesthetic and a Midwestern gothic sensibility, a complicated town history replete with grudges and ghost stories, and complex characters in a Buffy The Vampire Slayer–esque story with plenty of appeal. Ages 12–up. [em]Agent: Louise Fury, the Bent Agency. (Oct.) [/em]