Ghosts & Ladders

Is your house haunted? Would you like it to be?

If not your house - your office, your cars, your lake home, your boats - any or all of these can be haunted. And not haunted by just any ghost, but by the right ghost, a ghost that fits in with your décor, a ghost in alignment with your corporate philosophy, a ghost personally selected for you and put on your payroll by the professionals at Nyman Supernatural Acquisitions, the premier occult décor service in the Cities.

Why cope with the temperament of live actors when you can cast a real ghost in Hamlet?

Why clutter your yard with a manger scene of painted plywood cutouts and a 40-watt LED when you can give your neighbors a full-cast performance?

Why purchase old-fashioned plastic mannequins for your retail location when you can hire ghosts who look great in everything and interact with customers -- for half the price?

And ghosts are not just limited to looking good; they can also provide essential services. Take the example of Homer Slingsby: once the least feared and least respected gunfighter in Deadwood, South Dakota - he was the fellow who neglected to tell Wild Bill Hickock to duck - Homer's ghost learned from his failings as a live one and is currently one of the most respected spectral night security guards on the market.

Unfortunately - and this is the part the good folks at Nyman don't put in their excellent and informative brochure - Nyman Supernatural is a firm with problems. It may be a firm with more knowledge of ghosts and the ghostlands than any ghostbuster ever born, it may be a firm located in a prestigious century-old mansion, it may be a firm founded by the reclusive intellectual who translated the language of Ghost into the languages of the living and made communication with the other side possible, but it's also a two-person operation running on the flimsiest of shoestrings.

The problem presenting the people at Nyman is that they are the subjects of a takeover effort by a rival firm and they have but 30 days to raise sufficient funds to keep their firm independent. So they have to hire extra help and start working a lot of overtime in order to find both clients to serve and ghosts to hire, to bring that money into their coffers. This makes the book, essentially, a road trip, many of the chapters describing dealings with clients, ghosts, the competition, exorcisms, family relations, and of course, themselves.

It's a good story. It's got comedy, romance, ghosts, conspiracies, and occasional slapstick, and I think you'll like it!