Ghost Radio » (Bargain)

Leopoldo Gout is a producer, director, graphic novelist, writer, and composer. He is currently producing an animated film with NBC and Curious Pictures. He lives in New York City. Ghost Radio is his first novel.

Emanating from the cramped bowels of a dimly lit station—the demented dreamchild of hip, melancholy host Joaquin—Ghost Radio is a sanctuary for sleepless denizens of the night lost halfway between this world and the next. A call-in talk show that invites listeners to share scary stories about vampires and poltergeists, it is a bona fide cult phenomenon. Joined in the booth by his darkly beautiful girlfriend, Alondra, and his devoted engineer, Watt, Joaquin masks his skepticism, encouraging callers to withhold nothing as they spin nightmares and grotesqueries they swear are true.

But the wall separating reality from delusion—the living from the dead—is crumbling because Ghost Radio is going national, picked up for syndication by a huge conglomerate. And no one—not Joaquin, Alondra, or Watt—is even remotely prepared for what's coming next . . .

Publishers Weekly

Joaquin, the host of Ghost Radio, a call-in show based in Joaquin's native Mexico, builds a devoted audience with his combination of talk therapy and sharing of urban legends and spooky stories in Gout's first novel, a twisty if less than original supernatural thriller.A When Joaquin's growing prominence lands him a Newsweek interview, he decides to relate on the air a near-death experience decades earlier, which claimed the life of a close friend. Joaquin's personal problems mount as he begins to be drawn into his callers' stories and the line between reality and fantasy becomes increasingly blurred. The prose can be awkward at times ("he wondered how he got himself into this situation: a mysterious phone call, and less than an hour later, he'sA wrestling with a reverend of Toltec Christianity"), and Gout adds little that's either new or remarkable to the ghostly radio waves premise used more effectively elsewhere, notably William Sloane's The Edge of Running Water(1939). (Oct.)

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