Ghost Radio by Leopoldo Gout

Go ahead, caller. I'm listening.

Joaquin hosts a graveyard shift radio show where listeners call in to share their tales of encounters with the strange, inexplicable, and paranormal. Some are ghost stories, some are nightmarish horrors, others are unsettling experiences that suggest the smallest of tears in the fabric of reality; subtle hints that the world is not at all what we think…

The show, Ghost Radio, is a huge hit in Mexico, and now Joaquin is on the verge of bringing the smash hit format stateside. The future is bright and perhaps best of all, he gets to ride this wave of success alongside his talented girlfriend, Alondra, with whom he collaborates on the show.

But not all is rosy in Joaquin’s world. He is haunted by two huge tragedies in his past:

The first, when he was a teenager, was a fatal car wreck that ended the lives of both his parents. The silver lining to the accident was that during his lengthy hospital stay, he became tight friends with the sole survivor of the other vehicle in the crash: Gabriel, who is also newly orphaned.

The second, several years later, occurred when these two survivors, now best friends, broke into a radio tower to broadcast their band’s music — only for Gabriel to be killed by an unlucky lightning strike.

Ghost Radio shifts seamlessly between the present, the past, and several excerpts from Joaquin’s show. The chapters are short and so the book moves briskly, even if all these disparate pieces don’t obviously fit together initially.

The first half of the book seems content to detail who Joaquin is and what he’s been through up until this part of this life. For what it’s worth, Joaquin is not necessarily a likable character per se, but his backstory does make him sympathetic. The callers’ stories don’t directly relate to the plot, although they help sustain the creepy vibe the book is after.

It’s not until more than halfway through the book that the bottom drops out of Joaquin’s world. After being interviewed for a puff piece about his show’s move to the US, it transpires that the radio show he and Gabriel listened to together in hospital — the show that inspired Ghost Radio — never actually existed.

This revelation sets Joaquin on a course that upends everything…

Eventually he succeeds in tracking down a recording of a show from thirty years prior — only to discover that the voice on the recording is his own… He has visitations from his dead friend… His own identity is convoluted with Gabriel’s… Menacing phone calls lead him to a murder victim that he’s unable to ascertain that he didn’t kill…

And then the bombshell: even Alondra might not be who he thought she was…

The last third of the book is a page-shredding rampage across a rapidly deteriorating reality as Joaquin’s hold on reality melts into a Lynchian nightmare where as much as it is unbelievable, dire consequences remain an all-too tangible threat.

It’s rare that a horror novel dealing with alternate and non-realities works for me, but Ghost Radio absolutely does. Its scares come not so much from the external monsters abundant in Joaquin’s hellish new world, but more from the existential horror that comes from questioning all you’ve ever known to be true, yourself included.

Ghost Radio casts a compelling mood and, despite getting a little stodgy in the middle, the climax is well worth your commitment.