The Worthy: A Ghost's Story

Conrad had it pretty good in life -- a Porsche, pretty girls, and a trust fund full of oil money. But now, thanks to a brutal hazing incident at Louisiana State University's Gamma Chi fraternity, Conrad is dead -- a nineteen-year-old spirit suddenly without an earthly body. Make no mistake, the newly deceased Conrad is one angry ghost, and the object of his wrath is chapter president Ryan Hutchins, a "big, bright, rising star" who, in Conrad's view, is really "the darkest black hole you'll ever meet -- and I'm not just saying that because he killed me." Conrad's ghostly ability to see all but be seen by no one (except Miss Etta, Gamma Chi's elderly cook, who is gifted with paranormal powers) confirms his suspicion that Ryan's dark hand has a wide reach, from beating his girlfriend, Maggie Meadows, to terrorizing Sarah Jane Bradford, a religious student who senses that Ryan must be stopped. Out for revenge, Conrad possesses an unsuspecting pledge's body so he can finish what Ryan started, steering them toward a depraved confrontation with a surprising outcome that will leave readers gasping.

From Publishers Weekly

Clarke's novel, subtitled "A Ghost's Story," is a winning comedy of collegiate (bad) manners, set at Louisiana State University. The narrator, an affluent frat boy named Conrad Avery Sutton III, tells us right off that he's dead, murdered by fellow Gamma Chi Ryan Hutchins, a psychotic hiding behind a charming Big-Man-on-Campus veneer. Conrad makes it his afterlife's work to bring cocky Ryan down, with the help of the frat house's salty cook, "crazy" Miss Etta. She knows Conrad is still on Earth to protect hapless fraternity pledge Tucker Graham, who, like most of the world, sees Ryan as "a big, bright, rising star." It sounds a little like a sitcom, albeit an edgy one, but Clarke fashions a hilariously addictive yarn, with crackling prose and sharp observations that consistently entertain and surprise. He drives the plot over the top with portraits of hypocritical religious fanatics and unrestrained party animals, and into baby Grand Guignol territory with a swath of outlandish killings—but it all works as black farce of a high degree. (July) Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Booklist

If the movies Animal House and Ghost got married, this novel is what their offspring might look like. The narrator, Conrad Avery Sutton III, had it all, including a bid to join Louisiana State's most desirable fraternity. Then a hazing prank went horribly wrong, and Conrad was killed. Now he's a ghost with only one thing on his mind: revenge against the fraternity chapter president who's responsible for his death. The novel somehow manages to be lightly comic and darkly dramatic at the same time. It's a clever commentary on the whole frat scene, as well as an evocative exploration of some of the practical realities of being a ghost. Lots of fun, from the zany author of the cult favorite Lord Vishnu's Love Handles (2005). David PittCopyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Chapter One If you ignore what I have to say, it really won't surprise me. I've come to find that most people ignore the dead. If you do choose to hear me, listen closely, because what I have to tell you is a story of unholy proportions. Hopefully, if I can make you hear what I am supposed to tell you, I can finally break the ties that bind me to the secret letter society of Gamma Chi. But before we get started, let me tell you about myself. My name is Conrad Avery Sutton III, and I am dead at age nineteen. When I was alive, I won't lie, I had it pretty good -- the Porsche, the pretty girls, and a trust fund full of oil money. When I started as a freshman at Louisiana State University there was no question that I would rush. My daddy had been a Gamma Chi as well as his daddy and all the men in the Sutton clan. Well, there was one exception, my cousin Barrow, who got blackballed and now he's got one of those rainbow stickers on the back of his truck. God, my daddy and uncle were so embarrassed; they still don't talk about it. I went through Rush and I of course got a bid. I'll admit I thought I was the shit with my navy jersey and gold letters. Next to my Porsche, those letters got me laid more times than I can remember. Of course it was all fun and games in the beginning -- one endless keg of cold beer and blunts on command. But this mixture of chronic booze and blood oaths turned into a bitter, stinking mess. Busted lips and broken beer bottles were all part of my pledge training. I was cocky, and the brothers saw fit to divest me of this character flaw. So I scrubbed urinals with a toothbrush to the beat of someone punching my kidneys. I served meals to my brethren walking only on my bloody knees. And when a spit cup was not readily available for an active brother, I learned to offer my hand as a spittoon. I even learned the fine art of acting. I was given the starring role in Gamma Chi's video reenactment of the "Wasabi-up-the-Nose" scene from Jackass: The Movie. I never could smell right after that. By the end of my first semester, I had learned to be a good pledge. I could recite all fifteen hundred words of the pledge creed -- backward even. And for the amusement of the active chapter, I was asked to perform this dyslexic feat for their dinnertime entertainment. It's amazing how a knuckle upside the head can force you to learn even the most boring crap. So I find it almost poetic that this bright April morning, the brothers will dedicate their new library and scholarship fund to me. The Conrad Avery Sutton III Memorial Library is a beautiful addition to the big old Gamma Chi house. My new library is full of polished woods, brass lights, and leather-bound books. Daddy went all out for his dead son. It was his way of dealing with my death. He worked while others cried. It obviously paid off; the construction crew completed the job in less than two months. And that's no small task, considering how rainy South Louisiana gets in the early spring. You know, it's weird being dead. You're everywhere but nowhere all at once. You can sort of hear people talk before they speak, but you can't speak yourself. Or at least, you can't make people hear you when you speak. On rare occasions some folks have actually heard me. But most people are too busy with their own thoughts to pay any attention to mine. There is, however, one perk to being dead: The living are like open books that you can read without turning the pages of a conversation. Only thing is, most of the books in this stupid old house are full of blank pages and cheap porno. So I guess it's really not as cool as it sounds. I mostly find myself following around Ryan Hutchins. He lives on the third floor and he's the biggest coke-snorting asshole you'll ever meet -- and I'm not just saying that because he killed me. When he's not busy killing innocent people like myself, he's beating his beautiful girlfriend, Maggie Meadows. He knocks her around quite a bit, and the saddest thing is that she never really fights back. I rage and scream something horrible when he does this to her, but Ryan is deaf, dumb, and blind to me and I can't do anything to save poor Maggie. These are the things that you should know about Ryan Hutchins -- not that he teaches poor kids to swim at the Y or that he donates blood every month because he's got that universal blood type. No, the real truth is what you need to know about him. That's because to everyone at LSU -- and I mean everyone -- Ryan's this big, bright, rising star. But truth be told, he's really the darkest black hole you'll ever meet, and nobody seems to realize this. Which profoundly annoys me, considering the psycho pretty much murdered me in cold blood. Of course, Maggie Meadows knows Ryan's a complete head-case, but she'll never tell anyone. She's too ashamed or in love or scared or I don't know what to ever tell. Speaking of Maggie, her bruises are covered with makeup today and she stands there with her pretty blond hair in my library, greeting alumni as the sweetheart of Gamma Chi. Ryan stands by her side looking so sad and full of compassion that it makes me sick. You would have thought his best hunting dog got run over by a truck. "He was a great guy." Ryan keeps nodding and shaking off tears. It's the same morbid song I heard at my funeral, and everyone's singing the second verse here today: "His parents are devastated." "They had to check his mamma into one of those Charter hospitals." "His dad sure didn't waste any time building this place." "Or money." "He was a cool guy. He let me borrow his Wilco CD." "Kimbrough found the body." "What did it look like?" "He won't talk about it." "Conrad was a real Gamma Chi." This grief-fest has me ticking like a time bomb. I want to go off and punch someone. However, I can't: I'm no longer the owner of a pair of fists and that makes it kind of hard to hit anything. But something weird is in the air today. Maybe it's the fact that everybody's gathered here concentrating on my memory, but for some reason, I feel almost alive again in this library. I wonder if I could muster up the energy to do a real haunting on these bastards. You know, like spell out "Ryan killed me!" in blood on the walls or something real Poltergeist-like. But, no, I've actually tried that before and I just can't seem to get it to work. "What you doing in here, boy?" Miss Etta, Gamma Chi's house cook, looks up at me as she lays out her buffet spread. "You can see me?" "Get on back to heaven! You dead now -- shoo!" She flings her long crooked hand at me. "Go and be with the Lord now." Everyone glances at crazy Miss Etta and dismisses our conversation as her obvious senility. I follow Miss Etta back to the kitchen as she hobbles away from me. "Hey, wait a second, Miss Etta." "I don't talk to the dead." She shakes her head. "You need to go back to heaven 'fore you upset folks." "Hey, I can't go back." I point to the library. "Something's keeping me here." "That's your problem. Let me alone now." She opens the big stainless steel fridge and pulls out a vat of Swedish meatballs. "But Ryan killed me!" "Listen, boy, you think that's going to make a difference if I march in there and tell them white folk that?" She shakes her spatula at me. "I know he killed you and I know he be beating on that pretty girl in there too. But ain't nobody going to listen to me." She scoops brown gravy and lumps into a serving dish and lights a Sterno can underneath it. "Now get out this house and go back to heaven." For some weird reason, those words alone build up this pressure around me and push me out of the house. I find myself outside looking through the windows of my wood-paneled library as Ryan stands at the podium. "Conrad was not only an outstanding scholar and pledge, but most importantly he was our friend and our brother." Ryan sticks out his bottom lip and slowly nods his head. There goes Mamma boohooing again, and Daddy just sits there not knowing what to do with his hands. And here comes Miss Etta with the meatballs. She sneers at Ryan, but nobody seems to care. She's right; nobody would believe her. "It is a great honor" -- Ryan holds his mighty gavel in his right hand -- "that I, on behalf of the men of Gamma Chi, dedicate this library and scholarship fund to the memory of Conrad Avery Sutton, the third." Ryan pounds the table with his gavel like he used to do my face on so many an occasion. It's the same gavel that I heard rap the night I swore an oath to this brotherhood of lying bastards. It was my pledging ceremony -- the night that Gamma Chi's first secrets were revealed to my pledge brothers and me. We were bound, blindfolded, herded, and punched into the back of a flatbed and driven out to the woods. They unloaded us like sacks of rocks into the dirt. "Get your sorry asses up!" an active slurred at us. I felt someone's Red Wing boot kick me in the side and then the heel fell swift on my back. The force pushed my face into the cold earth. I was such a chicken shit that I was too afraid to spit, so I just swallowed the blood and dirt. "Sutton! He said get up!" some weasel-ass active yelled. I struggled and writhed against the rope and finally stood upright. Once we were all standing, they filed us into rows. The brotherhood swarmed around us and shouted, "Worthyworthyworthy! Worthy!" Then it was silent except for the crackle of a few twigs underfoot. A match scratched and I could smell the gasoline and sulfur and then an all-encompassing red glow filled the blackness. "Remove their blindfolds." "Hold still," an active growled in my ear, and the black rag was jerked from my head. I squinted. The fire was too bright and too hot and I was too close. My eyebrows were nearly seared off by a twelve-foot burning cross. "Behold! The Fiery Cross of Gamma Chi!" Ryan barked from behind a velvet-covered card table as he read from what looked like a hymnal. "Th...

About the Author

Will Clarke is an American novelist who is the author of Lord Vishnus Love Handles: A Spy Novel (sort of) and The Worthy: A Ghosts Story. A native of Lousiana, Clarkes books eventually became underground hits in the early part of the 2000s. Both books have been selected as the New York Times Editors Choice while Clarke was named the Hot Pop Prophet by Rolling Stone magazine in 2006.

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