Kiss the Goat: A Twenty-First Century Ghost Story »

Kit is a twenty-five-year-old Yorkshire bus driver who isn't quite like the rest of us, as the old story goes. One day she hears a passenger playing a song - the Electric Hellfire Club's "Kiss the Goat" - a song she never knew existed outside the ghostly manifestations that have been haunting her lonely nights, complete with sounds, smell and sight. Enter, then, the ghost of Rose Selavy . . . a devil-worshiping prostitute with more on her mind than just bodily possession . . .

Publishers Weekly

In this unusual ghost story from Stableford (The Carnival of Destruction, etc.), Kit Miner, a young Yorkshire bus driver, doesn't know what to make of the strange aural and tactile hallucinations she has in her cheap boardinghouse room until she overhears a rock music tune leaking from a random bus rider's Discman and realizes that it's a tune that sometimes plays during her weird experiences. The rider, art history student Stephen Carraway, reveals that it's a cut by the goth band the Electric Hellfire Club, and this is the first clue that Kit is being haunted by someone with infernal interests. With Stephen's help, Kit discovers that Rose Selavy, a suicide who once worked as a prostitute in Kit's room, is trying to connect with her. Though a bit too talky and analytical in spots, this novel, with its heady mix of historical and pop culture sources, shows how a truly inspired writer can find an original new angle from which to present one of supernatural fiction's most familiar themes. (June) Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.