Book review: Communing with the dead is good business in Helene Dunbar’s ‘Prelude for Lost Souls’

“St. Hilaire was all about guiding the living through contact with the dead,” explains 17-year-old Russ Griffin in Helene Dunbar’s new young-adult novel, “Prelude for Lost Souls.” “We weren’t witches. St. Hilaire High wasn’t Hogwarts. We simply relayed the words of the dead to those who needed to hear them.” Russ is one of three troubled teens whose lives intersect in the mysterious town of St. Hilaire, New York, at the end of the summer tourist season.

In St. Hilaire, the tourists consist of “the inquisitive and the desperate, those in mourning and those overcome by guilt.” Many of the residents are mediums for hire, willing to put their clients in touch with those who have died and help them find the answers for which they search, as long as the price is right. Russ shows real paranormal promise and aspires to membership in The Guild, the town’s heavy-handed governing body. Abandoned in St. Hilaire by his mother when his talent first began to show, Russ mines his late grandmother’s notebooks for recipes and instructions that will make him stronger and secure his future, little counting the cost to his own health in the process.

By contrast, his best friend, Dec Hampton, is fed up with St. Hilaire and ready to leave. Two years earlier, his parents were killed in a car accident that only he survived. Despite The Guild’s strong wish that he remain, Dec has no interest in living the rest of his life in a town that, in his opinion, preys on “grief and guilt and greed.” Dec’s supernatural skills are minimal, but that doesn’t prevent him from being haunted by a spirit named Tristan, a young British man who smells of lemons and smokes endless Indian cigarettes while spouting cryptic messages and warnings. Dec wants nothing to do with Tristan, and to calm his nerves, he listens to recordings by his favorite musician, the teenage Russian concert pianist Anastasia “Annie” Krylova.