The Worthy: a Ghost's Story

The Worthy: a Ghost's Story - by Will Clarke

I picked up Clarke's first novel, Lord Vishnu's Love Handles, earlier this year and found that I couldn't put it down. The crazy story about a shallow, materialistic Dallas dot.commer with psychic abilities who gets drawn into working for the CIA as a psychic spy, loses everything, and eventually achieves some kind of spiritual redemption, was at times over-the-top, but full of vivid observations and witty prose. So I was curious to see what The Worthy would be like. Suddenly, Clarke is hot - in fact, he has just been listed as "Hot Pop Prophet" in Rolling Stone's latest Hot List, and both his books have been bought by Hollywood. (Lord Vishnu is reportedly set to be produced by Michael London who did Sideways). The Worthy was actually written before Lord Vishnu, but published after the other's success. It's quite a success story - Clarke self published Lord Vishnu and it really took off on Amazon, achieving a kind of cult status. He is now signed with Simon & Schuster.
The Worthy is about the ghost of a frat boy who was brutally killed in a hazing incident at a southern university fraternity. Conrad, the ghost, is another somewhat shallow, privileged character, who, by the book's end has achieved a certain amount of growth and compassion. Conrad haunts the campus, obsessed with avenging his death. The only people who can see him are the college's elderly african-american cook, and a wacky religious sorority girl. Much mayhem ensues as he finds he can temporarily possess the bodies of the living, especially an oversized, rather dimwitted fraternity pledge. Fraternity life is depicted in all its obnoxious and appalling detail, but there's always this other level at work. (The New York Times recently said of Clarke that "his plotting reveals a man who thinks like Will Ferrell and dreams like Samuel Taylor Coleridge."!) The plot takes a lot of crazy twists but ultimately leads to a resolution that I found pretty satisfying.