Published by Wendy Lamb Books
Released September 11, 2012
240 pages
Where I got it: E-galley received from publisher via NetGalley
Rating: 
Description (from publisher):
Jane is not your typical teen. She and her best friend Lexi call themselves the Creep Sisters. Only Lexi knows why Jane is different from anyone else: Her own shadow seems to pull her into near-fatal accidents. Jane is determined to find out why these terrifying things happen, and to overcome her shadow enemy. Her sleuthing with Lexi connects her own horrors to the secret history of a serial killer.
I love a good ghost story. I like my ghosts to be mysterious, haunting, yet not too gory. There needs to be sadness and tragedy attached to them, and maybe a pinch of anger at the living. It also helps if the ghost is that of a child, picked before its prime. All this can add up to a stale story, though, if it’s just a continual rehash of a body buried in a lost grave and a wandering ghost. Fortunately for us, Graham McNamee has added enough of a twist to the age old ghost story to make it fresh again.
Jane has issues. She sleepwalks constantly, waking up in the middle of the road at night in nothing but her sleeping clothes. It’s so bad that her parents lock her in her room and make her wear a GPS device. That’s not all, though. Jane’s shadow seems to have a mind of its own, causing her to attempt suicide against her will. The shadow detaches and subjects her to potentially fatal actions, like drinking poison or grabbing a live fallen electrical wire. It’s a miracle Jane is still alive at all. She’s terrified because she doesn’t want to die, not again, not since she experienced a near-death-experience in the operating room.
Sleep is creepy: a state that looks similar to death when we’re at our most vulnerable. McNamee plays up the sleep/death connection throughout this book in waking nightmares as well as sleepwalking. Beyond was genuinely spooky, and satisfied my need for solid dark ghostly horror, giving new meaning to “shadow people.”
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Beyond sounds really interesting. I, too, like a good ghost story and feel like we’re at a severe shortage of decent ones in recent years. I’ll definitely be adding this book to my TBR list!
I think it will be a good one for the Halloween season
I’m not huge on ghost stories, but wow Beyond sounds really, really good!
Thanks for the great review!