The Ghost That Ate Us

 The Ghost that Ate Us: The Tragic True Story of the Burger City Poltergeist by Daniel Kraus, 302 pages.

"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.'" Author Daniel Kraus compiles interviews with every living survivor, new evidence, and other sources from "the most exhaustively documented haunting in history" into a complete account of the tragedy.

At this point I need to clarify that this is a completely fictional novel. The former paragraph is a selection from the actual, standard description of the book. This novel commits harder to passing itself off as nonfiction than any other book I've seen with a similar premise, and I honestly really respect it. Kraus dedicates the book to characters that died in the fictional tragedy, includes numerous footnotes to articles that don't exist, and even adds photos with fictional image credits (the real image credits on the very last page are actually the only time in the entire printed text that it admits to being fictional). Max Brooks' Devolution had a similar concept, but Kraus both commits to it harder and nails the tone of pop-nonfiction better. I'm a real fan of horror passing itself off as nonfiction, so I enjoyed all of that thoroughly. 

Beyond the gimmick, I found this to be a very compelling horror novel overall. The book tells you from the beginning how it is going to end, and still kept me desperate to know what was going to happen next. Even more impressively, it manages to pull off some pretty haunting twists (if you'll forgive the pun). It was also way less gross than I was afraid it would be, given how horror set in restaurants tends to go. This book has a very different tone than the average horror novel, but I would definitely recommend that people give it a shot.