The Ghost in the Electric Blue Suit

by Graham Joyce Narrated by Gildart Jackson

Overview

David, a college student, takes a summer job at a run-down family resort in a dying English resort town. This is against the wishes of his family...because it was at this resort where David's biological father disappeared fifteen years earlier. But something undeniable has called David there. The characters have a suspicious edge to them...David is haunted by eerie visions of a mysterious man carrying a rope, walking hand-in-hand with a small child...and the resort is under siege by a plague of ladybugs. Something different is happening in this town. When David gets embroiled in a fiercely torrid love triangle, the stakes turn more and more menacing. And through it all, David feels as though he is getting closer to the secrets of his own past.

Editorial Reviews

Publishers Weekly - Audio

12/22/2014
In Joyce’s poignant, haunting, and humorous coming-of-age novel, British college student David Barwise recalls a very hot, dry summer of 1976, when, at age 19, he spent the months before his sophomore college year working at a fading holiday resort in Skegness, an English town on the North Sea. Employed as a combination social director and general factotum, David makes friends with some of his colorful “odd fish” coworkers, antagonizes others, falls in love with two women, and is disturbed by glimpses of a couple of ghost figures. His paramours are a lovely, whip-smart young dancer named Nikki and a dour but sexy cleaning lady named Terri. Terri’s married to a jealous brute named Colin, who inexplicably takes David under his muscled wing, introducing him to members of the white-supremacist U.K. Front Party, some of whom work at the resort. The ghosts—the bespoke title character and a young boy—have arrived for a reason that takes David awhile to discover. With the eccentrics, love interests, racists, and resort guests, reader Jackson is given the opportunity to display an assortment of vivid accents, among them Colin’s gruff Cockney, the fluty faux Etonian of the resort’s showtime announcer, the tenor singer’s tongue-rippling Italian, the motor-mouthed Mancunian of David’s roommate, and the demanding squawks of the guests’ children. Topping them all is the proper English of David, both as the deep-voiced, mature narrator and the higher-pitched, less-confident “new boy” at the resort. A Doubleday hardcover. (Sept.)

Publishers Weekly

06/02/2014
At the start of the latest novel from Joyce (Some Kind of Fairy Tale), a coming-of-age story set in the summer of 1976, college student David Barwise arrives in Skegness, a gritty English seaside holiday resort, looking for a job. Although his decision is prompted partly by a desire to avoid working for his stepfather, David also wants to revisit the beach where, when he was three years old, he witnessed his father die of a heart attack. He has long suspected that his family has never told him the full story. After landing a job at the resort, David immerses himself in the hardscrabble world of carnies, fortune-tellers, and worn-out comedians. His kindness and humility enable him to make friends quickly, including with, to everyone’s surprise, the volatile, anti-immigrant, English nationalist Colin. But when David proves unable to refuse the advances of Colin’s wife, Terri, the resulting tension is palpable. Precisely because Joyce is a master of dialogue and character, the artificial plot complications provided by the mystery of David’s unresolved past feel unnecessary, but, otherwise, his sweltering summer escapades make for a terrific and absorbing read. Agent: Doug Stewart and Madeleine Clark, Sterling Lord Literistic. (Aug.)

From the Publisher

"While many writers find it convenient to create entire fantasy worlds for their magic, there are others who specialize in discovering the hidden magic in our own lives, and one of the best of these is Graham Joyce....[The Ghost is the Electric Blue Suit]'s real magic lies in its flawless evocation of a disappeared era, and the sense of almost apocalyptic dislocation provided by the heat, the swarming insects and — on a darker note — the increasingly disturbing political atmosphere of late '70s England.
—Chicago Tribune

“This novel’s characters, major, minor, and in-between, are as finely formed and evenly wound as Joyce’s readers have come to expect…Vivid…a voyage of inwardly directed discovery filled with grubbiness and poignancy, elation and regret. [A] nearly perfect book…Like a poem, every one of this book’s parts play off each other; like an unforgettable refrain of days gone by.”
—The Seattle Times
 
“Joyce has built a cult following…If he keeps writing books as engrossing as [The Ghost in the Electric Blue Suit], Joyce might enjoy a transition from cult following to full-blown religion among a legion of readers. He certainly deserves it.”
—Richmond Times-Dispatch

"What's the line between falsehood and fantasy? Between fear and horror? Between other worlds and the ones we carry inside our heads? Graham Joyce has been asking — and brilliantly answering — these questions for years...Joyce has written a jewel of a novel that blends gentle nostalgia, Bildungsroman angst, and a glimpse of the dark, unreal places where loss and memory mingle...Unearthly, but it's also wonderfully funny...His prose is exquisite."
—NPR.org

"Beautiful, available women; ugly racist shenanigans; haunting apparitions. They all come with a college student’s summer job in this marvelously juicy entertainment from the British fantasist [Graham Joyce]… Joyce folds [the] supernatural element gracefully into a realistic coming-of-age work that is also an evocation of a vanishing subculture….There’s so much to enjoy here, from the fake stage magic of a woman sawn in half to the real magic of a gifted professional at work."
—Kirkus
 
“Joyce expertly captures a certain time and place, when family resorts were fading out and political extremism was on the rise, overlaying his snapshot with a subtle hint of the supernatural.”
—Booklist
 
“Joyce is a master of dialogue and character…his sweltering summer escapades make for a terrific and absorbing read.” 
—Publishers Weekly

“Really scary … erotic and darkly supernatural.”
– Library Journal

"In The Ghost in the Electric Blue Suit, Joyce weaves a bizarre, colorful story, full of nostalgia, indecision, emotion and tension, and this genre-spanning novel is sure to be a favorite of fantasy, suspense and thriller fans."
—BookPage

“Joyce's most remarkable achievement is the tense atmosphere of this slim and haunting novel, simultaneously dreamy and chilling….An entrancing fantasy of a young man's search for past and future in a single summer of change.”
—Shelf Awareness (Starred review)
 
“Graham Joyce deftly paints the environment and loads it up with a host of characters, each one more surprising than the last….The pages fly by as quickly as the sun-drenched summer days of youth, leaving in their wake the feeling of having added David’s memories of his wild summer at the beach to our own consciousness.”
—Examiner.com

Library Journal - Audio

11/15/2014
This tale of speculative fiction is set during the summer of 1976 and follows David Barwise, a college student working at a run-down seaside resort, Skegness. When David was three, his father was found dead at the beach at Skegness. Now as David sorts through his own repressed memories, he is seeing a sparkling man in a blue suit on that beach. He's also embroiled in his coworkers' interesting exploits; involved with an older married woman; and indirectly connected to political intrigue. The plot is slow moving, but the characters are likable; Gildart Jackson provides an engaging and eloquent reading. VERDICT Of interest to fans of the author and the genre. ["Recommended for readers who enjoy their coming-of-age tales with a hint of dark fantasy," read the review of the Doubleday hc, LJ 7/14.]—Denise Garofalo, Mount Saint Mary Coll. Lib, Newburgh, NY

Kirkus Reviews

2014-06-05
Beautiful, available women; ugly racist shenanigans; haunting apparitions. They all come with a college student’s summer job in this marvelously juicy entertainment from the British fantasist (Some Kind of Fairy Tale, 2012, etc.).Back in the day, there were English coastal resorts that gave working-class families a week of strenuous fun. Working-class himself, David Barwise looks for work at the Skegness resort, drawn there because of his father’s fatal heart attack on the beach when he was a toddler. It’s 1976, and the heat, strangely, is scorching. David is hired as a utility player at the tacky resort, working with both kids and grannies. He’s an appealing lad, if a touch naïve, and a hit with the friendly vacationers, but life is far from problem-free. He’s drawn into the orbit of two cleaners, Colin and his gorgeous wife, Terri. Colin, a brutal ex-con and abusive husband, makes David report any flirtations Terri may have, not realizing the student is a prime suspect; Terri and David feel a strong mutual attraction. On another front, David is bamboozled into attending an anti-immigrant fascist meeting, which lands him in hot water with another gorgeous woman, the half-Guyanese dancer Nikki. And there are his visions: a man in a blue suit with a boy. David feels revulsion. A primal fear is alive in him; a psychic, the resort’s resident laundry woman, will help him work through the trauma. Joyce folds this supernatural element gracefully into a realistic coming-of-age work that is also an evocation of a vanishing subculture. David is torn between Terri and Nikki; then Terri disappears, and Colin summons him, late at night, to dispose of some heavy plastic bags….There’s so much to enjoy here, from the fake stage magic of a woman sawn in half to the real magic of a gifted professional at work.

Product Details

BN ID:	2940175425254
Publisher:	Dreamscape Media
Publication date:	08/19/2014
Edition description:	Unabridged

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