The Papaw Diary
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The average ghost never wears a watch either. Ghosts could care less about measuring time. Every day is just part of forever. Forever is a very long time, even longer than six billion. So one tenth of forever is still...well, forever. Dividing up time into hours and days just doesn’t make sense in the forever ghost world. Ninety-nine percent of the ghosts don’t hurt people. That’s the good news. Papaw told Kai and Jay that, and they each seemed to breathe a little easier. Until... But then there are the other type! They’re the ones that give the good ghosts a very bad name. How many good ghost movies are there? One? Well, not many more than that. But bad ghost movies? They’re all over the place. And that is what Papaw was trying to explain. The one percent of bad ghosts aren’t just bad. They are the worst, most frightening, most blood-curdling, dirtiest, meanest, most dangerous ghosts known to humans. They’re called GHOULS. Ghouls are ghosts that come from the people who die a horrible death and never had a chance for a proper burial. They’re ghosts who are missing something. They can’t live in the same ghost world as the normal ghosts unless they, well, unless they scare a person to death, then crawl inside the person’s body and get properly buried. Ghouls need to get inside the skin of a living person, before the person dies, and then scare them to death so that the person dies. It’s pretty awful. That’s where the haunting and scaring comes in. Normal ghosts have no reason to haunt the living. Ghouls have to do something so they can get inside the living person before the person dies, but just at the very moment the person leaves the living. That means they have to do anything they can to scare someone to death! They love to do things to make people notice them. They appear in chains, or they walk out of a lake covered with fish hooks, or out of a river with catfish jumping out of their pockets. One of their favorites for people living near an ocean is to walk out of the ocean covered in seaweed. They can change into just about anything. They can switch their ghostly forms so they look like a person’s dead relative. They can change into a monster. They have all kinds of tricks like this and the whole idea is simple: scare those people out there to death, jumping into their bodies just before they die. Then the scared-to-death person gets buried properly, the ghoul does too, and even an awful ghoul gets to join the good ghosts.
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About the Book
Ghosts. Ghouls. Goblins. Just about every G word that makes your blood turn blue. It’s in here. Banshees too. And one seriously baaaaaaad wizard. Dragons. Knights with long poles. Knights with rusty butts. It’s all inside these covers. Two brothers who grow up around a house made of blue and white bricks. One becomes a singer and the other a teacher. But both wind up colliding with a tanker truck and die, exploding into space. In here, I tell you. There’s also a castle where a man named Rocky falls in love with someone named Katie. Yeah, pretty yucky stuff, I know. That’s in here too. But what happens in that castle will curdle your blood, and make you hurl your lunch. You got to see that stuff. Oh, and basketball too. The most famous basketball game of all time is right inside this book. Where can you buy a book with so much stuff for less than a thousand dollars? Hurry, before the author catches on and raises up the price. (This book was named a finalist in the children's fiction category of the Fresh Voices 2006 Awards, sponsored by the Writer's Marketing Association)
About the Author
Dennis W. Shepherd was once a kid, just like you. As a second grader he and his best friend were walking to school in the snow and got a really great idea. They went home and told their moms the snow was too high. They couldn’t get through! They spent that entire day waiting for their dads to come home. It wasn’t fun at all like they planned. Neither was what their dads did to them when they got home. Ouch! In the seventh grade, Dennis got into a fist fight with another kid who took his seat on the porch railing outside the cafeteria. They each earned one black eye and a free trip to the Principal’s Office. Dennis must have won because he had his very own seat in the Office the rest of the week. As a grownup–YUCK–he attended advanced studies in ghostology at Ima Haunting U., graduating summa cumma dedda in his class. He specialized in the identification and classification of ghouls, goblins and banshees.