“What is the point where a human being stops being a human being and becomes a thing? Most people think it happens with death but Dalmar knows it can happen a long time before then if it needs to, so that other people can bear what they are seeing. I found Dalmar, Tom, Melissa, and Andrew’s lives interesting and affecting. Although depressive, very much so, it was interesting to glimpse the fears and desires of the people observed by ghost-Lisa. Lisa is somehow able to tell what these people feel and think, and there is a sense of quiet resignation in the people she observes. Through Lisa Evans, the ghost of a suicide victim, we follow some of the night staff in their everyday lives. Forgotten and largely overlooked, they are forced to deal with horrific situations such as suicides.
Louise Doughty’s use of the supernatural, although patchy, allows her to create a mosaic of the lives and troubles of the people working at Peterborough Railway Station. The first 30% or so of this novel proposes a slow and atmospheric take on the ghost story. One of the weakest aspects of this book is that it tries, and doesn’t really succeed, in combining two different genres and concepts together. “There was a man on the station only two hours ago who will never go home again.”
Platform Seven by Louise Doughty is a good domestic noir novel. I enjoyed Lisa's observations and feelings about some of the staff members however I was disappointed when the reader was denied one particular 'visit' I had been anticipating. The narration style put me in mind of The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold, as did the internal musings about life after death in general. I don't tend to enjoy the amnesia trope on a good day and I found this part of the novel unconvincing.ĭespite the creepy premise and terrifically spooky cover, Platform Seven reads more like a domestic noir novel and could easily have been marketed very differently. The majority of the novel is Lisa recalling the lead up to her death and how she ended up in her current state. Lisa enjoys watching the train station employees and the commuters come and go until the man's suicide triggers a series of events and the clearing of cobwebs in Lisa's memory. Lisa is our protagonist and she is a ghost in the afterlife, haunting Peterborough Railway Station with little memory of what happened or why she's there.
He is watched by Lisa Evans and she knows what he plans to do because she did the same thing just 18 months earlier. In a train station on platform seven, a man has decided to commit suicide. Platform Seven by Louise Doughty has a premise that hooked my interest early on.
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