About the Book
Fade to Black is the newest hit ghost hunting reality TV show. Led by husband and wife team Matt and Claire Kirklin, it delivers weekly hauntings investigated by a dedicated team of ghost hunting experts.
Episode Thirteen takes them to every ghost hunter's holy grail: the Paranormal Research Foundation. This brooding, derelict mansion holds secrets and clues about bizarre experiments that took place there in the 1970s. It's also famously haunted, and the team hopes their scientific techniques and high tech gear will prove it. But as the house begins to reveal itself to them, proof of an afterlife might not be everything Matt dreamed of. A story told in broken pieces, in tapes, journals, and correspondence, this is the story of Episode Thirteen—and how everything went terribly, horribly wrong.
464 pages
Published January 24, 2023
Ghost-hunting TV shows are a guilty pleasure of mine. Most of them are too sensational for my liking, but I'll still watch them sometimes. My favourite ones, though, are ones that attempt to approach ghost-hunting reasonably scientifically. It's one thing to bring along a ouija board and claim that the movements are due to spirits, but it's another thing entirely to regularly measure electromagnetic fields and notice a correlation between EMF spikes and strange potentially supernatural activity. Whether you believe in ghosts or not, adherence to the scientific method is still respectable.
Episode Thirteen presents us with one such show, Fade to Black, where the research team is comprised of people who believe, people who don't, and people who just kind of need a job. It's not enough to investigate potentially haunted locations, though. With Fade to Black being a TV show, the crew needs to consider not just what interests them, but also what might interest viewers. Keeping the ratings up and the show fresh means more funding to do what they love, so they have to walk that fine line of compromise. So it seems like a bit of a dream come true when Fade to Black gets the opportunity to investigate a very famous location, one with a history of strange paranormal experiments done in the 70s, one that the show's head, Matt Kirklin, has had his eye on for some time. They hope to find answers to the mysteries of the building's past, but what they find turns out to be so much darker than they expected.
That last statement isn't exactly surprising. Most books have a, "And then they get in over their heads," plot at some point. In a bit of a meta twist, it keeps the book's "ratings" fresh. It keeps people reading, to see the twists and turns.
Episode Thirteen tells its story through journal entries, text message threads, and transcribed audio, a full documentation of the crew's experiences in Foundation House. While DiLouie could have employed third-person omniscient, or third-person limited while switching character perspectives, and still given the reader access to the thoughts and emotions of each character as well as the story beats, using epistolary storytelling gives everything an extra layer of connection. You read Episode Thirteen feeling like you're actually reading the files and records of real people who participated in the show during its final episode. Complete with all the conflict and drama you'd expect. The characters don't always get along, and even the husband-and-wife team of Matt and Claire has a lot of friction, as their approaches to the show and what they want from their lives. It also echoes the found-footage horror genre and brings it to the page instead of the screen, which I can appreciate. (I'm also a fan of bad found-footage horror movies. They're a different sort of guilty pleasure.)
For my part, I found Matt and Claire to be the most interesting characters. Fade to Black is their show, for the most part, and they each have a different role to play that's complementary while also being contradictory. Matt's a true believer, he goes into things hoping to find evidence of ghosts due to a childhood incident he couldn't explain. Claire is a skeptic, and uses her science background to debunk things as much as she can. This sounds like it would make for a lot of back-and-forth arguing, and sometimes that does happen, but it also serves to strengthen the show and the investigations, ensuring that every potential explanation for an event is investigated scientifically. If science can't explain something, then it's assumed to be paranormal in origin. And I liked that dynamic, even when it led to personal friction, because I love seeing science in my ghost-hunting.
It's not that the other characters were uninteresting, though. But I found Claire and Matt the most compelling. There were times when it seemed like other characters were primarily there to provide extra conflict and drama, as they didn't really contribute much else to the story.
At a certain point, Episode Thirteen goes from exciting and surprising to being bleak and claustrophobic and full of dread, where the characters are absolutely in over their heads and the full weight of what they've uncovered begins to take a toll. DiLouie did a really good job of conveying this atmosphere; I've read other books that feel like they're trying to do that but don't quite stick the landing. It was good to see it so well done here, and I appreciate the kind of effort it must have taken to not only build that tension but also to do it in a way that still worked within the confines of epistolary storytelling. I'm strangely a fan of bleak endings in horror fiction, though I can see how that tonal shift might not work well for all readers.
If you enjoy ghost-hunting shows and haunted house stories, then Episode Thirteen is probably going to be a book you enjoy. It might be over 400 pages, but the story goes so quickly that it feels like a much shorter book, while still cramming in a lot of character development and plot. The combination of modern technology and psychedelic 1970s experiments works quite well, and I was impressed enough with DiLouie's storytelling that I now want to find more of his books to read. If they're anything like Episode Thirteen, I'll be in for a flawed but overall enjoyable experience.
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