Summary: The Electric

The GIST

The Electric is the debut novel of Andrew David Barker, a writer and filmmaker born in Derby, England, in 1975. It is a ghost story, but an unusual one. Its ghosts are not there to frighten you. Its haunted building is a long-abandoned picture house on the edge of an ordinary English town, and the films it shows are made by ghosts, for ghosts. Set in the late summer of 1985, it follows fifteen-year-old Sam Crowhurst and his friends as they stumble into this impossible cinema. In the process the book becomes two things at once: a love letter to the movies, and a tender, aching portrait of childhood slipping away. Barker himself calls it his love letter to cinema, and he says that everything in it is decaying in some way.

The novel began very small. It first appeared as a limited hardback edition of just 150 copies from Boo Books, then came out in paperback. It drew enough acclaim to earn a 10th anniversary edition, with a new introduction by Stephen Volk, the screenwriter of Ghostwatch, and a new afterword by the author. Reviewers have compared it to vintage Ray Bradbury and Stephen King, praising it as resonant, evocative and deeply moving. It matters because it does something rare. It takes the furniture of horror (ghosts, ruins, a sinister older figure, a forbidden place) and turns it toward wonder and grief instead of dread. The result is a story about how films hold on to the people we lose.

The Story

It is the tail end of summer in 1985. Sam Crowhurst is fifteen, at the age when the long, golden holidays of childhood are starting to feel numbered. Out on the outskirts of his town he discovers The Electric, an old cinema that has been shut and abandoned for years. In a town like his, a building like that ought to be nothing but broken seats and dust. But The Electric still screens movies.

The secret Sam and his friends gradually uncover is that these are not reruns of old classics. They are new films, made in the afterlife by the dead, and shown to an audience of the dead. The great performers and filmmakers of cinema's first century have not stopped working just because they died. To them, death is no reason to put down the camera. In Barker's imagined afterlife the creative business of moviemaking simply carries on, with the sense that their work is not yet finished.

The ghosts themselves are one of the book's most striking inventions. Barker deliberately set out to imagine a ghost differently. His are not wispy white sheets or translucent shades but solid entities that spark and shift with colour, so dazzling that at first the young heroes can barely bear to look at them. It is an electric, almost cinematic image of the supernatural: the dead as moving light, rather like a picture projected onto a screen.

Through The Electric, Sam glimpses a whole hidden mythology of filmmaking beyond the grave. Some of the most delightful details concern the stars and directors who people this world. Humphrey Bogart is there. So are comic and horror figures like John Belushi and Bela Lugosi. Barker also reaches for faces more often loved than named: James Finlayson, the moustached foil from the Laurel and Hardy films, and the British comic Will Hay, who once starred in The Ghosts of St. Michael's. Barker consciously avoided the overused icons, so there is no Marilyn and no James Dean, which gives the afterlife cast a fresh, connoisseur's flavour. In one lovely conceit, Charles Dickens has written a screenplay so good that the dead are waiting for David Lean to pass on so he can direct it. Barker believes Dickens, a keen actor and stage director with a famously cinematic eye, would have embraced film had he lived to see it.

The films themselves are invented with obvious relish. One is A Murder of Crows, a horror picture uniting Theda Bara, Lon Chaney, Peter Lorre, Boris Karloff and Bela Lugosi. Another is Mad Dogs, a supernatural comedy pairing silent-era daredevil Harold Lloyd with John Belushi. A third goes by the title Houses of the Hanged. Across the book The Electric's programme takes in fantasies, horror films, gangster pictures and slapstick comedies. Barker has admitted he had to stop himself writing more and more of them. These are dream double-bills that could only exist on the far side of death.

The real world around Sam is just as worn as the cinema. The story moves between The Electric, a dilapidated old house and a car breaker's yard, all places of rust, rot and things left behind. At the heart of it all are three teenagers, Sam and his friends, sharing the discovery and its strangeness during a few weeks that will matter for the rest of their lives.

The wonder is not unshadowed. A dark undercurrent runs through the book, gathering around a figure named Seymour Janks. And the afterlife's mythology has edges that are only hinted at. Sam is told about a town in the desert where he will never want to go, a detail readers have found quietly chilling exactly because so little is explained. Barker resists the urge to map out every corner of his supernatural world, leaving intriguing questions in the dark beyond the projector beam.

The whole tale is told in the first person by Sam as a grown man looking back on that summer. That framing tinges every scene with hindsight: the sense of someone who knows how precious and how brief those days were. The book also deals with bereavement, and the presence of ghosts feels entirely fitting for a story about the edge between childhood and adulthood. Where that grief leads Sam, and what The Electric finally means for him, is best discovered in the reading.

What It's Really About

Loss, in all its forms. Barker has said plainly that The Electric is about loss of every kind, and that this is what makes it universal. It covers the loss of people, the loss of places and, above all, the loss of childhood itself. The decaying settings are not just atmosphere; they are the book's argument. Cinemas close, houses crumble, cars are broken for parts, and fifteen-year-olds grow up. Yet readers consistently find the novel bittersweet rather than depressing. That is because Barker wanted a positive depiction of the supernatural, one in which the dead are luminous and still creating rather than lost and grieving.

Cinema as a kind of haunting. The book's deepest idea is the link between ghosts and film. Barker describes celluloid as capturing "ghosts in waiting". In little more than a century of moving pictures, millions of lives have been recorded, telling the stories and myths of the age, and those images outlive the people in them. There is, he suggests, something supernatural about cinema. The Electric makes that literal: a picture house where the dead keep performing. Every film-lover who has watched an actor long gone light up a screen will recognise the feeling. The novel's interviewer connected it to a remark by Christopher Nolan about film spilling off the reel as a tactile reminder of time's relentless passage. That pressure of time hangs over both the ghostly filmmakers and the teenage heroes.

Nostalgia, sharpened into truth. Barker calls himself intensely nostalgic, more so with every year, and says he has a distinct sense of time passing. He was only ten in 1985, but that year stayed vivid to him, and he set the novel squarely in the middle of the decade. The book is personal: it is set in a time and place he lived, heavily fictionalised, and stocked with names and places from his own childhood. Writing it as a man looking back gave him, in his words, a voice truer to himself than anything he had written before.

That voice nearly didn't happen. Barker's first attempt was a far more conventional horror novel set in contemporary Los Angeles, with adult characters discovering the cinema in a ghost town in the Mojave Desert. He wrote about 26,000 words of it before realising it felt disconnected and "wasn't me." He started again with a personal, English, 1980s story. Traces of the abandoned version linger in the finished book, which may explain that ominous town in the desert.

A coming-of-age story in a grand tradition. Readers have noticed kinship with Stephen King's novella The Body (filmed in 1986 as Stand By Me). Both feature a grown man recalling a few pivotal summer days with a small band of friends, a junkyard, and an older menacing presence. Barker happily owns his love of King, especially the nostalgic, reflective books such as The Dead Zone, Hearts in Atlantis and Duma Key, the 1950s sections of It, and The Stand. Hints of The Dark Tower and The Talisman have been spotted too. Yet critics stress that the novel has its own voice and never reads as imitation. Other touchstones include Ray Bradbury's Something Wicked This Way Comes, Richard Laymon's The Travelling Vampire Show, and screen nostalgia from American Graffiti and Summer of '42 to The Wonder Years.

Why readers love it. It sits in a rare sweet spot. It is filled with ghosts but not especially frightening, and doesn't try to be. It centres on teenagers but isn't a YA novel, though there is nothing in it unsuitable for a teenage reader. It is a human drama that still gets to contain horror films, gangster pictures and slapstick comedies, in what Barker calls a bigger sandpit. Movie buffs get a treasure hunt of beloved faces, from Karloff to Finlayson, while everyone else gets a moving story about friendship and the last summer of being a kid. Its restraint is part of its power: by leaving the afterlife's darker corners unexplained, it lets the reader's imagination flicker in the dark like an audience before the lights go down.

Who Should Read It

This is for anyone who grew up loving old movies, classic monsters and late-night genre films, and for readers who treasure nostalgic coming-of-age tales like Stand By Me or Something Wicked This Way Comes. If you want a ghost story that moves you more than it scares you, and you are drawn to the 1980s, small-town summers, and the idea that cinema keeps the dead alive, The Electric will feel like a seat saved for you in the back row.