TOWARD THE CORNER OF MERCY AND PEACE

In Buchanan’s paranormal novel, befriending ghosts is easy—it’s real people who pose a problem.

Fifty-two-year-old Minerva Place is an opinionated and judgmental widow with a very active imagination. The anti-social woman does her best to avoid interacting with townspeople in her Paducah, Kentucky, community; she teaches piano lessons to local children, plays organ during Sunday services at her Baptist church, and leads an otherwise uneventful life other than her visits to the Oak Grove cemetery. After finding a gravestone with a name that piques her interest, she visits the town library to research her subject—even if it means she must talk with Harriet Boswell, the librarian, whom she feels is “too smart for her own good.” Later, at her own dining room table, she constructs historically informed narratives about the deceased person, augmented with imagined details. Then Minerva starts seeing and talking to those whose lives she reconstructs. Later, these visits from the other side—and her burgeoning relationship with a new neighbor—help her to reexamine her choices and open her heart to others. Along the way, Buchanan effectively shows how Paducah locals, who are privy to Minerva’s imaginings, aren’t very kind to her despite their attempts at God-fearing fair-mindedness. As the primary voice in the novel, Minerva may come off as one-note to some readers due to her fussy attitude; however, her no-holds-barred observations and criticisms and character studies give the novel a fine sense of humor, as when she considers the local minister, Brother Larson: “Even if he had been the kindest, most generous man on earth, Minerva would have disliked him based on his looks and behavior when leading the assembly in song. She realized this was an unreasonable judgment, but there it was.”

An often humorous tale of a curmudgeon who writes the undead back into the world of the living.