Wait Till Helen Comes

I've somehow skipped highlighting a bunch of my favorite childhood books in this blog. I had the urge to reread Wait Till Helen Comes a couple weeks ago and it's always just so good. 

This is hands down one of the best 80s kids ghost stories, if not THE best. (Not counting the Scary Stories folk anthology type of thing. That's its own genre.) I've had a handful of these since childhood and I'll do reviews for the others shortly. Wait Till Helen Comes was always the scariest and the most poignant, though Christina's Ghost has the scary image that's lingered with me the longest. The other two I reread a lot were The Dollhouse Murders (same author as Christina's Ghost) and When the Dolls Woke (less ghost, more supernatural). 

Anyway, the plot of Helen is that a blended family moves to a very rural area, taking up residence in a converted church. Molly is the POV character. She's 12 and a poet. Her brother Michael is 10 and obsessed with typical "boy science" things like bugs. Their mother Jean is a painter. She married Dave, a potter, and they now all have to suffer his seven-year-old's extreme bitchiness. Heather is one of those kids you love to hate. The cover captures her perfectly. That's a miserable kid right there and she's gonna make sure you're miserable, too. There's something about how she's depicted that just makes me feel completely unsympathetic to her. 

So the main focus of the book is the family's troubles. Not with Helen the ghost right away or even foremost honestly. The main problem is bad parenting. Her mother died in a fire when she was three and she's clearly got deep-seated issues because of that and needs some serious therapy, but there's a throwaway line about her father not believing in it. Instead what happens? Both of these idiotic artistic twats foist her onto Molly and Michael. Both kids had educational plans before the move and now they're stuck in the middle of nowhere with nothing to do and they're expected to babysit Heather constantly. Heather, by the way, fucking hates them and their mother and is not at all shy about saying it. Her father always believes her over them and is often rude to Molly and Michael. The entire book is filled with some of the worst parenting I ever read in a kids book in terms of neglect. 

Being that they live in a church basically, there's an old graveyard right behind it. Molly is properly freaked about this, though no one else is, and Dave in particular is cruel about that. I wouldn't want to live next to a graveyard. Nope. No thanks. Not the kind of quiet neighbors I want. 

Heather starts acting strangely, becoming obsessed with an old grave under a tree, where the caretaker has told all the kids not to play because there are snakes. She's horribly rude to him, too. Heather, it turns out, has befriended Helen, the ghost of a young girl who died in the 1800s. She wears a locket bearing Helen's initials, which also happen to be her own, and she frequently threatens Molly and Michael with Helen coming for them. Molly is freaked. Scientific Michael is kind of a dick. 

But come Helen does. She destroys the possessions of everyone except Heather and Dave. the others chalk it up to a weird robbery, but Heather and Molly know differently. 

Upon researching, Molly and Michael learn that Helen used to live in an old ruin that Heather keeps visiting. Her parents died in a fire and Helen ran out of the house, became confused, and drowned in the nearby pond. She was buried alone in the graveyard, her parents' bodies having never been found. 

Everything culminates in Heather running off to be with Helen, but Molly getting to her and rescuing her from drowning. They hide inside Helen's old home to get out of a nasty storm and end up falling through the floor, where they discovered the bones of Helen's mother and stepfather. A sad Helen finds them and begs them to forgive her. She started the fire that killed them just like three-year-old Heather started the fire that killed her mother, which was the bond between the girls. The parents' ghosts appear and reunite with Helen before all of them disappear. When the girls are finally found, a shortish time later, Heather plans to tell her father exactly what she knows about the fire. 

The book ends with Helen and her parents all being buried together in the graveyard under a stone angel. Heather finds Helen's locket dangling from the angel's fingers with a note asking to be remembered. It's a sweet ghostly gesture, though it's hard to forget that Helen likely killed a few people in her years of torment. It's also hard to forget how terrible Heather was, though that little moment at the end did make me like both of them and feel for them somewhat. 

If you can read it without being too critical of the atrocious parenting, the spooky, poignant ending is well worth the quick read it is. That's the part that makes the entire book so memorable and worthwhile. 

I'm very excited to say this book is getting the graphic novel treatment in September, a mere ten days before my birthday.