Cartoonist Evan Munday, who makes his prose debut with ECW Press’s first offering of fiction for young adults, proves to be the funniest thing to hit Canadian YA since Susan Juby.

Thirteen-year-old October Schwartz is an academically gifted goth who moves to the uninspiring town of Sticksville, Ontario. She hangs out in the nearby graveyard to work on her unintentionally hilarious horror novel (Two Knives, One Thousand Demons) and escape the gloominess of her clinically depressed father. There she meets a motley crew of five dead kids – all from different periods in Canada’s history – who help her solve a murder at her high school.

Munday handles this bizarre plot with comedic ingenuity, alternating between October’s first-person voice and that of a Lemony Snicket–esque narrator. From describing a teacher’s hairpiece as “a muskrat that some mischievous sorcerer had enchanted to lie still on his scalp” to making the spot-on observation that “Pizza is rarely an indication of a bad night,” Munday’s sarcastic humour makes for a zany side-splitter of a novel.   

While the tone is perfect, the plot sometimes feels overloaded: a murder mystery, dead kids, Canadian history, a depressed father, and an absentee mother are a lot for one novel to carry. Indeed, Munday could have focused on only one of these elements and created a perfectly engaging read. The cover may also fail to attract the audience this book deserves, as its foreboding, dark image of a frightened goth girl does not convey any of the hilarity inside.

But the fact remains that Munday’s unique brand of funny is completely worthy of teenagers, one of the most challenging audiences to coax into laughter. Munday is one to watch, as this first novel in a planned series proves in spades.