Once many many moons ago, I worked at a Burger King on Aurora Ave in Seattle. Aurora is a great place to be if you want to rent a room for an hour or get mugged. Not to brag but I was the biggest upseller in my restaurant. Was a ten-dollar Tower Records gift certificate worth super-sizing people into an early grave? Hell yes it was, I used it to buy a No Doubt CD.

The Ghost That Ate Us brings us back to those days and I found myself thinking of the good times I had at that place. The friendships, the inter-office romances, and covertly trading food with other dining establishments because we were so sick of the food that we were shilling. If author Daniel Kraus has never worked in fast food, they knew someone that did. The whole atmosphere is just too realistic to have simply come from someone’s imagination.

The book centers on a writer named Kraus who is investigating the so-called Burger City poltergeist hoax which led to a massacre that claimed the lives of many. He pieces the story together via interviews with the survivors who are seemingly wasting away and the so-called mastermind Kit Bryant who grows bigger by the day.

The “hoax” begins one day when Lil Beefy, a cardboard cutout of Burger City’s beloved canine mascot begins to spontaneously jump in place. Kit begins to investigate and spurred on by the internet turns their little restaurant into a media sensation. But the bright lights of fame quickly turn dark as more mysterious and deadly incidents occur.

I mentioned the realism of this book and it’s not just for the fast-food atmosphere. The characters are fleshed out well and are not just fodder to be unceremoniously killed off later. To add to the true story feel actual photographs depicting our main characters appear throughout the novel. I had to remind myself multiple times that I was reading fiction instead of some true-crime expose.

The final massacre as well as the ending is the cherry on top of a fantastic story. Even the reader already knows how it ended, the delightful feeling of true dread as you march along the pages up until the implosion that would drastically affect so many lives.

There is only one thing about this book that I genuinely disliked, and that is the meetings the employees hold and record at a local truck stop. The transcript is in all Italic script and the font change just breaks the flow of the story. Yes, there are key plot points in these conversations, but they could have just as easily been introduced in the main story as opposed to a hard-to-read sidebar.

That said, this has been one of the most fun and enjoyable stories that I have read this year and would definitely be on a Top 10 of the year list if I ever stopped being lazy and actually wrote one.