Johnny and the Dead
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Johnny and the Dead (1993) is a novel by Terry Pratchett featuring the character Johnny Maxwell. In this story, Johnny sees and speaks with the ghosts in his local cemetery and tries to help them when their home is threatened.
The story starts with Johnny and the gang (but not Kirsty, who isn't in this book) discussing the council's sale of Blackbury's neglected cemetery to a faceless conglomerate who plan to build offices on it. Various ghosts, led by a former town counciller, ask Johnny, the only person who can see them, to help stop it.
While Johnny, helped by his semi-believing friends, tries to find evidence of famous interees and speaks out at community meetings, the Dead begin to take an interest in the modern day, and realise they are not, as they believed, trapped in the cemetery.
By the end of the book the council is forced to back down, but the ghosts no longer care. However, the town's living residents have, thanks to the campaigning, rediscovered the cemetery as a link to their past. As one ghost puts it "The living must remember, and the dead must forget."
The book is loosely based on real events in Westminster in the 1980s, when the council sold three cemeteries as building land for 15p.
A running joke in the book is that most of the ghosts are "nearly famous", often being recognisable as very similar to a famous Briton. It is possible that Pratchett intends Blackbury Cemetery to be "nearly Highgate", especially as one of the most prominent ghosts (William Stickers) is described as "The man who would have invented communism if Karl Marx hadn't."
[edit] Adaptations
- The book was made into a TV serial for Children's ITV on ITV in 1995. It starred Andrew Falvery as Johnny, and featured Brian Blessed as William Stickers and George Baker as Alderman Bowler.
- It was also adapted as a play by Stephen Briggs.
