The Secret Sex Lives of Ghosts by Dustin Reade

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There are books that have such a strong effect on your life they cause you to take a minute. Reflect on all your life’s decisions. They have the power to change your world perception. Books that dig deep into your psyche and rewire the way you think, act, and live your life. They have the power to push you down the road less taken and experience new and wonderful things.

This isn’t one of those books, but fuck will you experience new things reading it. And have fun at the same time.

Meet Thomas Johansson, professional ghost hitman. After a near-death experience, Thomas is granted the gift (possibly curse) of seeing ghosts. And they are everywhere! Most of them are also perverts. (Like right now, at this very moment, in the time that it takes you to read this parenthetical sentence, there is a ghost next to you doing ungodly acts with its own non-corporeal body and there isn’t a damn thing you can do about it. Just accept it. And keep a box of tissues next to you.)

Thomas is quick to learn that several ghosts don’t know they’re dead. Not exactly, and sometimes you have to kill them again so they can crossover into the next realm. He also learns that there is financial gain at this unorthodox way of ghost busting. Soon enough, however, after taking an assassination assignment for a maybe-mob boss, Thomas learns where the real money is in ghost work. 

Having read nothing by Dustin Reade, I wasn’t fully prepared for the wild ride on which he was about to take me. But it was worth every second. He doesn’t hold back and even gets meta with the narration. However, I do wonder if he lost focus on the realm beyond – how the afterlife is represented during Thomas’s near-death experience and how it’s later depicted during the “drug-addled” mind of a “ghost” user. (That’s literally the only minute issue I had with the book, because I wasn’t sure if I had misunderstood what the afterlife is in his novella, or if it even matters.) Otherwise, the book is pricelessly hilarious with a dab of disturbing. 

You can pick up a digital copy on Godless or Amazon. (There’s even an Audible edition(!) which has me deadly curious.)

Until next time, keep on huntin’.