The Dark Behind the Curtain

'If you concentrate all your energy into one kind of feeling, it might make a kind of print that goes on after you're dead. Perhaps it stops knowing you're dead even.' When that energy is consuming hatred, evoked by a school production of Sweeny Todd, then mysterious and sinister things happen to the actors, most notably to Ann and Jackus; but not to Marshall, the boy who plays the barber himself, with a chillingly powerful skill and un-nerving realism which can only finally be contained and checked by desperate measures. This makes a well-written, compelling read; quite one of the best ghost stories I've read in a long while. Well recommended for Upper Junior/Lower Secondary. I'm thinking of it as a class reader.