I selected this book because the idea and the voice interested me. The cover boast that it is kind of like a modern day Hamlet adn in a lot of ways it is. In The Dead Fathers Club, you have chosen to re-imagine not merely a classic but arguably the classic work of English literature. Where does one get the daring to wrestle with a giant, and how did you go about making Shakespeare’s story into your own? The story starts getting darker in the last chapters, as one could expect from a Hamlet re-telling, though there are a few changes towards the end that don't betray the spirit. Wisely I think, the author sustains the bizarre events by throwing in a fair bit of humour across much of the story. The protagonist, Philip Noble, is a few years younger than the Hamlet of the original tale, allowing the author to present the story through the eyes of a confused child. However, the mood can’t be maintained in the last quarter, when things get a lot darker and there is a distinct tension with the earlier section of the book. Actually at this point I wondered whether I was going to write a review saying the book hadn’t succeeded for me, but it was saved by its ending, which gives the reader something to think about.

the book leads to a conclusion as tumultuous and powerful as Hamlet’s. While that might sound like exaggerated praise, it’s remarkable how Haig transforms the melancholic prince into a kid, the Danish court into a blue-collar inn and a schoolyard full of brats, the prince’s failed romance into a nearly asexual friendship with all the force of love. Genre fans should also be satisfied, for there’s more of the supernatural here than in the original: multiple ghosts from various eras, trapped in horrors not quite as absolute as fate. Faren Miller, Locus Magazine What a very unique premise for a book this was. A young boy of eleven loses his father, only to be confronted by his ghost. Ghost Dad tells him that he must get revenge for his father's death, and haunts the boy until he starts getting himself into trouble. Of course, nobody else knows his dad is still around. It's hard to review this without giving the whole story away, but I don't want to start telling the whole story as I don't want to ruin it for anyone else!A. I think it is. He clearly can’t come to terms with the sudden absence of his father so he ends up over-compensating through the creation of a world that only he can see. Grief’s a bit like that, isn’t it? It’s like the ‘phantom limb’ amputees feel. Your mind takes a while to get used to a devastating new reality. Mrs. Fell– The teacher and counselor of Phillip, Mrs. Fell is a lovely woman who offers comfort to Phillip. Ray Goodwin, is in the Dead Father’s Club; it is unclear whether or not Mrs. Fell knows this. A. In 1999, when I was living in Spain, I was prescribed diazepam for anxiety, but I didn’t get better until I stopped taking them.

The conversation I would love to have with Matt Haig, author of The Dead Fathers Club.* We would be sitting in a small diner drinking our hot beverage of choice.

It’s shortly after this that the ghost of Philip’s father comes to him and says that his brother, Alan, murdered him by severing the brakes on his car. Along with this news, a few other things: His girlfriend Leah is the only one who doesn't think he's a weirdo - until, of course, Phillip does something unspeakable to her father. What follows next is a potential recipe for tragedy - though with a rather different ending to the Shakespearean text (I won't give it away). Okay, I'll admit - when I started reading this book, I initially released an internal groan. Not another Shakesepeare interpretation, I thought! What more can be said about Hamlet - the play that's been covered literally hundreds of times in previous works? What is the most useful way to understand the spirit that we come to know as Philip’s father’s ghost? Should he be thought of as a character, as an embodiment of Philip’s anxieties, as a demonic presence, or as something else? Why does Philip trust him for so long? Matt Haig has an empathy for the human condition, the light and the dark of it, and he uses the full palette to build his excellent stories.”―NEIL GAIMAN

With Phillip, it's explored in much more detail - grief, resentment, inability to act, the sense of isolation - it's all there, in gloriously modern terms. What's also utterly magnificent is the possibility that the father's ghost doesn't exist at all - and that Phillip is suffering some sort of mental breakdown after losing a loved one. This puts a totally fresh spin on things, which I thought was really clever. It made me start wondering - what if that was the case in the original Hamlet? What if Claudius was actually totally innocent? Thought provoking stuff! Phillip's Dad, a former pub landlord, has recently died in a car-crash. Except (like Hamlet's father), he's refusing to die quietly. Instead, he starts haunting Phillip, telling him that he's part of the 'dead father's club' - men who have been murdered and who are seeking vengeance. Matt Haig’s The Dead Fathers Club takes up the question of the afterlife in the form of a ghost story that, fittingly for a novel preoccupied with limbo or purgatory (I can never remember which is which), straddles the line between adult and Young Adult fiction. It exists in an uneasy middle ground that has – I think – more in common with the former than the latter, but which might be a little too sophisticated and bleak for younger readers.at times funny, dark and very sad. . .The author expertly navigates through the murky waters of pre-teen life with scenes that ring true to life. And the first-person narrative by the young protagonist offers incredible insight into a boy’s life after his father dies.