You remember the brutal crime, don’t you?
Maybe you read about it on Twitter. Maybe a friend sent you a news clip. Maybe you saw it on an episode of Spectral Journeys that night you were flipping through channels, unable to sleep.
Maybe after reading the true story, you won’t ever sleep again.
On June 1, 2017, six people were killed at a Burger City franchise off I-80 near Jonny, Iowa. It was the bizarre and gruesome conclusion to nine months of alleged paranormal activity at the fast-food joint—events popularly known as “the Burger City Poltergeist.”
The story inspired Facebook memes, Twitter hashtags, Buzzfeed listicles, Saturday Night Live sketches, and more. But the case was never much more than a punchline…until bestselling writer Daniel Kraus (The Shape of Water, The Living Dead) decided to head to Iowa to dig up what really happened.
Presented here is the definitive story of “the most exhaustively documented haunting in history,” including—for the first time ever—interviews with every living survivor of the tragedy.
The employees of Burger City were a family. They loved one another. At least, at the beginning.
It really was just the other day I was on here talking about how Daniel Kraus never writes the same thing twice, and well. Here we are again.
THE GHOST THAT ATE US just may be his most unique & unsual book that I’ve read yet. I really dug this one overall. I think it had some pacing/length issues and it was like…I maybe wanted to love this a little more than I ended up actually loving it. But still. It’s Daniel Kraus & I think he’s honestly fucking brilliant, so of course I really enjoyed this. The creativity in this one is off the charts. And really…it’s almost like the more distance I get from the book, the more it impresses me. The fonder I grow of some of the people in it. I think it ultimately wasn’t the book I was expecting it to be, which has left me doing a lot of reflecting on the reading experience.
So…in the bookstore in my mind (a fun place!) this is in the horror section, along with all of Kraus’s books, honestly. But THE GHOST THAT ATE US almost defies categorization. The book is written as thought it’s a nonfiction book. Almost like a true crime book, with possible supernatural elements. Daniel Kraus is the author of this “nonfiction” book, so the whole thing is very meta. There’s even one character in the book who is a big fan of Kraus’s novels & references several of them, which just ramps up the weird reality-warping vibes of the story.
The book is also very grounded in a particular time, as it documents events that took place on and around June 1, 2017. The first Trump presidency looms large. But the “present” of the book, when Kraus is conducting his interviews & writing the book…that all happens in 2020, and the COVID-19 pandemic features heavily in the book.
The story documents a series of events that came to be known as “the Burger City Poltergeist.” These events primarily took place at a fast food restaurant, Burger City, situated on an off-ramp near Jonny, Iowa. The impact of the events would send destructive shockwaves through the lives of all the employees of this Burger City. Many did not survive the experience.
The employees begin to document the strange goings-on in the restaurant, with varying degrees of enthusiasm. Kit Bryant is at the center of it all. An affable, charismatic yet flawed kid, the story really revolves around Kit. Unfortunately when we meet Kit in the present, he is in a secured mental health facility.
THE GHOST THAT ATE US is surprisingly character driven. Daniel Kraus really gives each of these characters a fully-formed backstory, and a complex personality. So it’s easy to see the manager, Bob Nutting, as just the corporate schill. The killjoy. When everyone is oohing and ahhing over the cardboard standee (Lil’ Beefy, the dog mascot of the restaurant) that mysteriously moves at the same time each day, Bob is just trying to restore order and keep the restaurant running smoothly.
The journey that Bob goes on over the course of this book is nothing short of hellish, and you can’t help but look at him in a completely different light when all is said and done.
I think my advice to anyone thinking of reading this is to sort of adjust your expectations. I think I went into it expecting something more like a found footage horror novel but it doesn’t quite play out that way.
If I had to describe it, I might say that at times it feels almost like a workplace comedy/mockumentary. Except one that slowly becomes horrific, tragic, and deeply sad. You really get a feel for this interesting group of employees and you see what they all mean to one another. There’s all these different dynamics among the folks who work there day in & day out, and then…well, shit starts to go really bad, really fast. Trust begins to erode between the employees. And none of them are ever the same. To that end, keep in mind that the book gets dark, and deals with physical/mental illness, violence, and addiction.
I do have a silly sort of gripe with the book: some of the character names are quite strange. For a book that’s designed to come across as very realistic, some of these names just had me scratching my head: Ridgeley Maddison, Amy Mold, Zadie Budden, and Vandyke Elbutt to name a few. A really minor complaint, but there’s a lot more unusual names that I didn’t even mention. Just something small that kind of broke the spell for me on occasion.
I feel like this is a mess of a review, but oh well. THE GHOST THAT ATE US is certainly a worthy addition to anyone’s Daniel Kraus shelf. Like I said, the book wound up being something very different from what I had anticipated, but I still really enjoyed it.
Grimdark Dad 