Jake doesn't have a lot of friends. If he hangs out with anyone, it's his uncle, who runs a shop dedicated to the occult on what passes for the main drag of 1980s Niagara Falls. When Billy enters the shop, looking for a way to communicate with his recently deceased grandmother and make sure she's alright, dying so far from where she lived most of her life, Calvin offers to help. By sneaking Billy into the local mortuary. And Jake comes along.
For the remainder of the summer the tale spans, the three of them gather at places Calvin says have reports of ghosts. Sometimes Calvin's friend Les comes along, and sometimes Billy's sister, Dove, is around. But there's more going on with these locations and stories than Jake is aware of.
Davidson writes the book from Jake's perspective, looking back on that summer many years after the fact. Jake goes on to study medicine, and becomes a doctor who operates on the brain. So there are chapters that detail things he's seen or experienced in his work, mostly focused on what we don't understand about the connection between the brain as a physical object, and all the information contained inside it. A girl with an inoperable tumor that makes her sleep most of the time, lost in a fantasy world with a robot and druid as protectors. She can no longer recognize anyone in the real world, but when she draws how the robot and druid appear, they're her parents.
So in looking back, Jake views the summer of the ghost club is written as a transformational experience. In one sense, he starts to move past the point where he can believe in stories of haunted rail tunnels or stone angels that crush anyone who spends a night beside the grave. He starts to draw a line under what he believes is possible. But he also makes a couple of friends and, in being willing to stand with them, learns to stand up for himself, begins to become the person he'll grow up to be.
At the same time, Jake sees all the things he didn't understand about people back then - about Dove's shifts in moods, the struggle in his father between a respectable provider and the hellraiser he was, Uncle Calvin's fixations - with more awareness. As a kid, if your mother is cautious with money, or your dad can stand and talk on the doorstep with strangers for hours, you don't really think about why they might be like that. Whether it's childhood experience, or brain chemistry, or some cocktail/battle of the two. You have no frame of reference. That's just, how they are.
If Jake still doesn't, as an adult, understand exactly what's driving the people he cares about, he at least looks back with the knowledge those things were always there.
'Looking back, I wish I'd relished those final instants of childish fear: that saccharine-sweet taste of terror curdling like sour milk in my mouth.'
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