If H.P. Lovecraft and Boondocks creator Aaron McGruder had a literary love child, it just might look like Picking Up the Ghost. This genre-defying fusion of social parable and monster mash horror may challenge older audiences, but Milazzo's debut novel is worth a read. Trapped in a burnt-out factory town on the banks of the Mississippi, at 14, Cinque Williams already bears the weight of the world on his thin brown shoulders. As a smart kid who keeps his nose clean, maybe, just maybe, he will break away to a brighter future. But Williams yearns for the absent father he never knew and when one day a letter arrives informing him of his father's death, everything changes. "If his life was a river," Cinque reflects, "he'd better find its source soon because it was drying up."
Plagued (literally) by ghosts from his father's past, Cinque embarks on a journey with supernatural and metaphysical dimensions. Milazzo's characters are a combination of gangsta sass and Aleister Crowley creepy, and the blighted urban backdrop they haunt is both fantastic and all too familiar. In his battle to escape the sins of his father, no hand from here or beyond can help, so Cinque must "make the act from himself." A skeptical reader may find the comic book proportions of the hero's struggle a bit hard to swallow, but it does beg the question: Are Cinque's odds really any worse than those facing so many young black men? --Tom Lavoie, former publisher