59 pages • 1 hour read
City of Ghosts
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Themes
The Lasting Effects of Childhood Trauma
J. M. Barrie’s Peter Pan says, “To die will be an awfully big adventure” (Epigraph). Peter Pan is a mythic character who longed to live forever, chasing endless bliss in Neverland. Most children share this childlike illusion of immortality and bound through life with an insatiable taste for adventure and thrills. However, through serious illness or injury, some children become conscious of mortality and come to understand the fragility of life at an early age. When Cassidy Blake set out on a bike ride to photograph the budding spring landscape with her camera, she had no idea she would end the day in the hospital after nearly drowning in the river. Though her body recovered, the emotional and spiritual wounds of the event stay with her. The gentle tapping of the Veil represents the manifestation of her repressed trauma; each time she answers the call, she relives the harrowing event all over again. Through Cassidy, the author explores how a traumatic event or illness in childhood can leave an indelible mark on a child’s body, mind, and spirit.
Cassidy’s bike accident and near drowning did not leave any physical scars or disfigurement, but when her buried anguish rises to the surface, she endures real and visceral sensations, feeling the stabbing cold of the water and the burning in her oxygen-starved lungs as if they were happening all over again. Though her mind compartmentalized the event, her body remembers. Beyond the paralyzing physical sensations, Cassidy feels the emotional anxiety of impending death each time she crosses the Veil. When the accident occurred, she had no time to process what was happening; her body moved into survival mode. However, each time she answers the call of the Veil, she knows she must relive the trauma and endure the fear of oncoming death again.
As she moves about through the Veil, the cool-blue-lighted coil in her chest reminds her that her life is touched and marked by her brush with mortality. Aside from being traumatized again each time she crosses over, Cassidy finds it harder and harder to leave the Veil. She explains, “It’s like Neverland in Peter Pan—the longer the Lost Boys stayed, the more they forgot. The longer I’m on the wrong side of the Veil, the harder it is to get out” (200). Whether she is drawn to linger there to better understand her own mortality or held fast there by entities she cannot see, the Veil becomes a place where Cassidy is forced to face her traumatic accident by repeatedly reliving all the physical and emotional carnage of that fateful day.
When Cassidy meets Lara, she finds a friend who shares the experience of enduring childhood trauma. A severe illness that resulted in a high fever left Lara with a rosy, red glow in her chest that symbolizes the remnant of her near-fatal tragedy. Lara must also relive her illness each time she passes through the Veil, as she feels flush with fever and delirium. After Lara teaches her about her purpose in passing into the Veil, Cassidy understands the connection between her trauma and her purpose. Since she was spared death, she now owes a debt to the supernatural forces that saved her by helping ghosts who are trapped in a loop of tragedy and trauma. Cassidy’s compassion for the suffering soul in its final moments is evident each time she enters into the Veil. She is haunted not by the presence itself but by how the person died and why they are mired in the in-between. Her mother echoes this compulsion to understand, asking, “How do you make a ghost? […] Maybe it’s how a person lived. But I’ve always believed it’s how they died” (115). For Cassidy, ghost hunting symbolizes far more than an adventurous thrill. Instead, it is her duty to help release souls from the torment of their deeply buried trauma and despair. When she meets the grief-stricken ghost in his cabin, she deeply understands his grief and pauses to recognize and honor his sadness before releasing him from the Veil.
Cassidy connects to his anguish and suffering, but she feels a tremendous sense of relief when she sets him free; the tapping sensation disappears. By releasing other souls from their torture, Cassidy heals her own trauma one small piece at a time. At the end of the narrative, as she holds her life force in her hand, Cassidy is hit with the full force of her mortality. She thinks, “[…] All that comes to mind is the horrible cold I felt, the knowledge of how that day could have ended. Should have ended. Did end […]?” (232). Through the act of ghost hunting and reaping, Cassidy and Lara take the grief and pain they hold from childhood trauma and transform them into their superpower. Unlike Peter Pan, they desire not to live forever chasing endless selfish adventures but to make the most of their lives and use them to help others in need along the way.
An Intimate Experience of the Supernatural
At one time, Victoria Schwab headlined her website with these words from her novel A Darker Shade of Magic, “For those who dream of strange worlds […].” The idea of the existence of portals that can transport people to another place or time is a popular literary device, lying at the heart of such best sellers as Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, the Outlander series, and The Chronicles of Narnia. Most of Schwab’s works take place in a fairy-tale or fantasy world, allowing readers to journey into weird and wondrous places. Often, those worlds exist just below the surface of the real world, making accessing them as easy as opening a door. In City of Ghosts, Schwab explores the mysterious intermediate place between life and death through protagonist Cassidy Blake’s personal experience of the paranormal as she slips into the afterlife through a portal she calls the Veil.
People experience varying degrees of sensitivity to the paranormal. Cassidy’s father has only a cerebral connection to the afterlife, focusing much of his attention on the historical aspects of ghost stories. Her mother appears to have a more emotional connection to ghost lore and may even be aware of Jacob’s haunting presence in their home. Even their cat, Grim, seems to sense something otherworldly nearby. Conversely, after her accident, Cassidy develops an intense and sometimes painful connection to the preternatural realm and struggles to make sense of the profound sensations she feels when she engages in it. Her ghostly best friend, Jacob Cassidy, subverts the idea of being “haunted,” as he is neither frightening nor menacing. However, once she travels to Edinburgh, her experiences within the Veil intensify and she learns that not all ghosts are like Jacob. Findley, their tour guide, explains, “The living may take strength from love and hope, but the dead grow strong on darker things. On pain and anger and regret” (4). Cassidy’s personal, intimate sensations of the Veil build conflict as she wrestles not only with the external forces of hostile spirits chasing after her but also with understanding the reason why she has the power to traverse the supernatural realm.
Just as Cassidy’s experience of the paranormal is unique, so are those of the ghosts trapped within the Veil. Lara teaches Cassidy that each ghost is trapped in its individual loop, frozen in their final moments of grief. Their experiences offer another perspective on the theme of trauma, as the ghosts are doomed to continually relive their grief in a liminal space between worlds with no means of resolution or healing. As Cassidy learns to reap the ghosts and release them from the trap, she first focuses on the ghosts with empathy, seeing them as formerly distinct individuals with personal lives and connections, and her reaping allows them to be set free from their emotional pain. Prior to her trip to Scotland, Cassidy’s experiences in the Veil add to her sense of being an outsider; they are one more way she doesn’t fit in. For 12 months, Cassidy believes she is alone in her metaphysical experiences, but the trip to Edinburgh substantiates her experience and provides her with friends like Lara and Findley who understand and empathize with her phantasmal visitations.
The Inward Journey of Feeling Like an Outsider
Middle-grade fiction tends to focus on the external, with little time spent in the minds of the characters. Children’s novels typically focus on characters’ reacting to the events that occur in the story, as opposed to wrestling with their internal conflicts. The novel City of Ghosts is an exception, as the author uses first-person narration to reveal the protagonist’s fears and anxieties, allowing the reader to immediately connect with her. Through Cassidy Blake’s viewpoint, the author conveys the alienation and heartache of a person who feels like she does not fit in anywhere by revealing Cassidy’s intimate thoughts and feelings. There are two frequently occurring types of outsiders in fiction. The first is a character who moves to a new context and struggles to fit in with a new culture and social group. The second is a character who always lived in a particular place but never felt like they truly fit in with any group.
Cassidy experiences both versions of being an outsider. In her hometown, she does not feel as though she fits into the social order of the school. Moreover, after her accident and discovery of her ability to cross over the Veil, she does not feel like she belongs in either the world of the living or the dead. “[…] I’m always searching for trouble—because I don’t belong to one place” (22). Even though she lives in a house with two ghost hunters, she does not feel like she fits in with them either. When Cassidy travels to Edinburgh, she becomes another type of outsider. As an American living in a foreign country, she is perplexed by the culture of Scotland and feels uncomfortable with her lack of understanding of the Scottish dialect.
Cassidy finds a way to cope with her outsider status through her relationship with Jacob and, later, in her camaraderie with Lara. Finding no one at her school with whom she can relate, Cassidy is a loner who prefers the company of her camera to that of human friends. Through Cassidy, the author portrays the feeling of loneliness to which many young people can relate. Ironically, through her friendship with Jacob, a being no one else can see, Cassidy feels seen and known. He listens to her frustrations and validates her feelings. When she is feeling anxious or scared, he makes her laugh. They share a common language of friendship through their endless list of rules and feel completely comfortable around each other, just like they would in a normal friend relationship. Cassidy says, “We’ll just pretend—that we’re normal, that he’s not a mind-reading ghost, that I’m not […] whatever I am. That I'm not drawn toward places full of death like a rock rolling down a hill. Constant as gravity" (125). Despite the abnormality of companionship with a ghost, Cassidy’s relationship with him makes her feel a little less like an outsider.
When Cassidy meets Lara, she finds not only a British friend to help her better understand the culture of the new city but also someone else who shares her strange ability. Lara is an outsider, too, as she is from India but temporarily living in Scotland. Beyond becoming a companion, Lara gives Cassidy language for their shared skill. She explains, “An in-betweener, […] A betwixter. A shadow-crosser. […] You know, what we are” (160). When Lara says we, she makes a powerful statement, proclaiming Cassidy is no longer alone in her plight and giving her a shared identity with a living peer. She may not fully understand why she was chosen to be an in-betweener, but at least she knows she is not alone. Even the spell they pronounce over each ghost before they reap them is a powerful statement of recognition: “Watch and listen […]/ See and know […]/ This is what you are […]” (148). As Cassidy watches and listens to Lara explain and demonstrate the job of a ghost hunter, she sees who she is clearly for the first time. Her uncommon and taboo proclivity may still put her on the fringes of mainstream society, but meeting Lara gives her at least one friend with whom she can share her experiences and eases her sense of being alone.
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By V. E. Schwab
