Last time on the Summoning, nothing continues to happen.

AFTER LUNCH, IT WAS time for math. That was one class where the tutor needed to know exactly where I was in the program and my math teacher hadn’t sent over my work yet, so I was allowed to skip it for now.

I don’t know why the book even does this. It makes no sense but there isn’t even any point to the change. And of all things, math? How hard is it to figure out where you are in math?

Math was also the class Derek had been sitting out the day before, and he did so again, taking his course work into the dining room as Ms. Wang gave a short lesson. I guessed he was doing remedial work and needed the quiet.

I don’t know why the book is doing this either. Since when does the kid sitting by himself being left alone by the teacher mean he’s struggling with the subject? Why would she think this?

Anyway, Chloe’s free time, which was apparently so super important the book had to make up a stupid excuse to give her it, is spent writing an email to her friend, then worrying about what the account name will be and if it’d tip her friend off. Chloe, the fact you’re not allowed send an email from your own account will be obvious enough.

I’m really glad she got out of math to do this, because clearly, it’s impossible to manage something so complex in the mere hours of free time she already has.

She’s unable to check what the sender field is because she’s too dumb to check the settings, so instead she assumes that it’d just say Lyle House, then she tries to google Lyle House to see if a mental institution comes up, and it doesn’t, so she figures she’s fine. She doesn’t even think to check “lyle house mental illness”, which is what her friend would probably try if she’d heard the rumors.

But instead she decides that her friend will look it up in the phone book, so she decides not to send the email and call instead.

But one of the random search results mentions some guy named Lyle who died in a fire. This is necessary because Chloe is so fucking stupid that she’d completely forgotten the suggestion of searching to find out if there really was a janitor who died in a fire. I swear, reading this book is doing a great job of getting across the feeling of your brain not working. If there was the slightest sense it was deliberate I’d praise it, but I think Chloe’s inability to string two thoughts together is just how the author writes. Apparently a protagonist capable of making decisions is too much to ask for.

So she finally, finally investigates it, not because she really intended to but because by chance she ended up in front of a computer and happened to see something that jogged her memory enough that she remembered an idea someone else had.

At least she’s doing something. She finds that there was indeed some janitor guy who died by fire in 1991, which is earlier than whatever her birthdate is, and she even looks up a picture and it’s the same guy. But maybe it was that she heard it subconsciously, Chloe thinks! Chloe, shut the hell up, there is no way you’d know that theory because you know absolutely fucking nothing about anything. If the author wants you bright enough to know how human brains can work, she should have damn well written you with a human brain in the first place.

Then it gets dumber as Chloe invokes the dreaded movie cliché of “if this was a movie, you’d think the girl was dumb for not getting it.”

Yet this girl, our supposedly intelligent heroine, doesn’t believe she’s seeing ghosts? Give yourself a shake.

First, book, no, we already know that Chloe is far more than dumb. She saw something that was either magic or technology indistinguishable from it last night and has completely ignored it. Before that, she managed to ignore the sobby ghost in the auditorium. Oh, and she’s shown absolutely no interest in investigating her hallucinations, her illness, her medication or, well, anything. At all. In fact, this right here where she’s got an actual reason for her hallucination explanation is by far the smartest she’s been in the book.

Second, she’s a damn film major. She must have seen films where the twist is that actually the person is crazy. From how Chloe talks, you’d think all she ever saw were summer blockbusters.

Derek, once again, appears out of nowhere to loom over her. He asks if that’s the guy she saw at her school. Another point for the idea Derek is a fellow necromancer.

Really, you’d think necromancers would get picked up and diagnosed as mentally ill all the time. I think it’s pretty plausible that the kids would figure out that they’re seeing real ghosts not long after their first panic – especially if, unlike Chloe, they made any attempt whatsoever to experiment with the ghosts they were seeing to confirm they were real. But they’d already be in the system by then, and it’d take a little while to prove they were fine now and get back out, so there’s enough lag time that a new necromancer being picked up before an old one is released seems like it’d happen sometimes.

Of course, this depends on how many necromancers there are. If there’s a lot – hell, even if there’s just more than just Chloe – then there’s the usual issue of how (and why) it’s being kept secret. People in the real world make a perfectly good living just pretending to see ghosts. Someone who really could shouldn’t have any trouble finding people willing to believe them and help them prove it’s real – and since it actually is real, it’d stand up to the resultant scientific scrutiny.

He opened a fresh browser session, typed a single word, and clicked Search. Then he straightened.
“Try that. Maybe you’ll learn something.”
* * *
I’d been staring at the search term for at least five minutes. One word. Necromancer.
Was that even English?

Okay you know the quote: “There are 387.44 million miles of printed circuits in wafer thin layers that fill my complex. If the word ‘hate’ was engraved on each nanoangstrom of those hundreds of miles it would not equal one one-billionth of the hate I feel for humans at this micro-instant.”?

Like that.

But with more of a desire to stab something.

After five fucking minutes of gaping like a braindead fish at the word itself, she manages to muster the brainpower to actually check the fucking results. She clicks on a wikipedia page for the definition.

Necromancy is divination by raising the spirits of the dead. The word derives from the Greek nekros “dead” and manteia “divination.” It has a subsidiary meaning reflected in an alternative and archaic form of the word, nigromancy (a folk etymology using Latin niger,”black”), in which the magical force of “dark powers” is gained from or by acting upon corpses. A practitioner of necromancy is a necromancer.
I reread the paragraph three times and slowly deciphered the geek talk

That’s right, kids. If you’re capable of understanding words with more than two syllables, you’re a geek talking geek talk and this book isn’t for you dweebs, it’s for cool kids like Chloe who spent their infancy amusing themselves by bashing the soft spot of their skull on the table, then eating lead paint as soon as they could toddle to the nearest window.

I see this in books all the time, especially kids’ books. So, because everyone else is apparently a fucking moron:

Kids who are reading are probably capable of reading. Imagine that! So the endless parade of “heroes” who seem targeted at the kids who don’t read is a waste of everyone’s time. The kids who don’t read aren’t going to pick up your book and if someone makes them pick up your book only for them to get the message that reading comprehension is for lame nerds it’s not going to get them to pick up another one of their of free will.

THIS IS A BOOK ABOUT A NECROMANCER WE KNOW WHAT IT IS.

Chloe continues to search in the hopes she can find a site that’s written for babies, or possibly particularly clever housepets, which will explain what on earth “talks to ghosts” could mean.

I discovered a role-playing game class called necromancers, who could raise and control the dead. Was that where Derek got it? No. He might be creepy, but if he’d misplaced the boundary between real life and video games, he’d be in a real mental hospital.

It’s also kind of a common thing in movies. If only Chloe watched those.

Also, you think you see ghosts and Liz thought she had a ghost protector. Neither of you are able to tell the difference between real and fantasy, and while yes, you both belong in a real mental hospital, here you are.

Anyway, Chloe goes back to Wikipedia and stares at the page more as if that’ll make it make sense. I imagine she probably has the sort of pitiful look that a kitten has staring at a door. It knows that there’s some magic way the door opens and shuts but it just can’t understand! Maybe if it looks sad really hard, someone else will do the magic thing for it instead.

The difference is that kittens have a reasonable level of intelligence.

Chloe decides Derek thinks she’s an evil black magic practitioner. Eh, whatever, at least she’s coming to some sort of conclusion instead of just ignoring the entire thing like she did with Liz’s poltergeist.

Was he trying to save my soul? Or warn me that he was watching? I shivered.
Aunt Lauren’s women’s health clinic had once mistakenly been the target of a militant prolife group.

I really like the “mistakenly” there. Because, you know, if they’d actually been doing the evil abortions it’d have been fine, but Aunt Lauren is a good person who is 100% in favor of dead women and unwanted children, just like Chloe is a good person who doesn’t do black magic so in her case it’s wrong for her personally to be targeted.

If Chloe was actually one of those filthy heathan wiccans then Derek burning her would be totally fine, just like burning those evil, evil baby murderers.

To distract us from the fact the author is a horrible person and I hate her, we now move on to Chloe finally hitting the part about necromancers raising zombies.

a horrible painting filled my screen—a mob of dead people, rotting and hacked up, being led by a guy with glowing eyes and an evil grin. The title: The Army of the Dead.

Chloe keeps flipping through and shuddering at the entire idea, even though before she was bitching about how Jurassic Park was a movie for little kids and she supposedly watches lots of horror films. But A PICTURE OF A ZOMBIE?!?!?! And WORDS TALKING ABOUT THEM?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!??!?!?!??!?!?! She won’t be able to sleep for a week. They’re way more horrible than that time she watched someone burn down to a smoldering corpse and then chase her around the school.

More sites. More old engravings and paintings. Grotesque pictures of grotesque men. Raising corpses. Raising spirits. Raising demons.
Fingers trembling, I turned off the browser.

And that’s the end of the chapter.

Wow, this is some shitty, shitty writing. Let’s summarize:

Chloe thought about sending a letter, and then she changed her mind.
Chloe finally confirmed ghost janitor was a ghost. It’s only twelve chapters into a book that gives away this fact on the back cover.
Chloe learned what necromancy is.
Chloe is the most delicate little flower who ever claimed extensive knowledge of horror movies.

What have we, the readers who this book is supposed to be entertaining, learned? Jack and shit, unless we count discovering new depths in Chloe’s failure as a heroine, protagonist, and thinking being.

I guess Derek did something. Something that relies on Chloe’s idiocy being expected, but something. Of course it’s still a bullshit unnecessarily mysterious something instead of just fucking explaining, so I don’t think he really deserves any credit for moving the plot. Besides, she already thought she saw ghosts.

And why didn’t he just search “ghost medium” since that’s what’s actually going on with her?

You know, the group dynamics are bothering me, and god knows there’s not much else to talk about here, so let’s consider them.

When Chloe arrives at the Lyle House for Severely Disturbed But Inexplicably Unsupervised Children, there are three girls and three boys. The girls were the stronger characters – Liz introduces her to the place, Rae tells her about the people and mental illness, and Tori’s an antagonist who’s pretty active. Peter gets maybe three mentions in the entire book, and Simon and Derek just sort of brood and don’t explain anything. We’ve now lost one of each, so we end up with a balanced group of two on either side, and of course our protagonist is female.

Only the girls have faded out. It’s clear that whatever’s going on, Derek and probably Simon are going to be important. Liz is dead and had no idea what was going on, Rae has no idea, and there’s no sign Tori knows anything either. The plot is now centering on Chloe trying to find out what the mysterious boys know. Well. Okay, the plot is now centering on us wanting to know what the mysterious boys know, because fuck if I can tell what Chloe’s doing.

This probably seems like a natural way to do it – put the important information in the hands of the characters who are more apart from the main character and different from her, so it’s harder for her to learn. But they’re not in any way apart unless we rely on the usual bullshit men are from mars thing. There’s no gender segregation in the place. In fact, the boys regularly corner Chloe when she’s alone. There’s no reason why their gender would make them less trustworthy either – Chloe’s suspicious and nervous, but that’s because they’re acting weird and threatening.

In short, there’s no reason why this role couldn’t be filled by a similarly unforthcoming girl. But instead, the girls are either falling into automatic friendship or, in the case of Tori, pointless antagonism. Tori having a vital piece of the puzzle would be a pretty good idea, actually. Not only is she established as hostile, so readers can understand why she wouldn’t immediately be helpful, but that’s how Chloe sees her, so if she later tries to be helpful there can be another period when it’s Chloe who’s holding things up due to her own hostility.

It’s simply how people default to thinking. The girls have stock roles – they’re either her friends or her sworn enemy. The boys are the ones actually connected to the plot. Aside from some bullshit metaphor about how the opposite sex is mysterious and Chloe is journeying into womanhood by uncovering their secrets, there’s no actual reason for this setup.

Also, worryingly, the book makes it clear traditional necromancy is just chatting with ghosts, the black magic and zombies is a more recent warping of the meaning. Do you know what else traditional necromancy is? Fucking boring, I want the damn zombies.