The Other Ones: is it mislabelled?

Today I’m talking about The Other Ones by Fran Hart. I’m not 100% sure where I found out about this book, I think it just popped up in my search when I was looking for more queer books to read that aren’t specifically just about the romance.

Our blurb says that Sal hates standing out. But he lives in a haunted house – and everybody knows it. His oldest friend, Dirk, tries to help… but he wants to stay popular, and Sal isn’t helping. Elsie was popular – until recently. Now she’s on the outcast’s table too… and she doesn’t want to talk about it. Then there’s the new boy, Pax, who won’t leave Sal alone. His idea of a good time is hanging out in graveyards. And, for some reason, Sal just can’t stay away. Meet the other ones. Can they banish their ghosts together?

So the book opens on Sal absolutely just raw-dogging handfuls of dry cereal into his mouth when the doorbell of his crusty, supposedly, haunted house rings. It’s Pax, of being mentioned on the blurb fame, who is stood on his doorstep with a casserole dish in his arms and telling him that he can help Sal with the ghosts. Sal quickly takes the dish and sort of just shoos Pax away, and then Sal’s bestie, Dirk (his Dirkstie), shows up and we see that he’s in love with Sal’s older sister, Asha. At school/sixth form, people are gossiping that something happened with this girl, Elsie, but we don’t immediately find out what it is since Sal is dedicated to skating through sixth form on okay grades and being unnoticed. Going a little deeper into this, Elsie ends up showing Sal this article of the “top ten most haunted houses” which has Sal’s house on the list. She also mentions that her friends aren’t really her friends at the moment. This whole time, Pax is being very annoying, but Sal ends up breaking this guy’s nose for bullying Pax – as he should. Not in terms of physical violence but slay of him for defending Pax. And the four of them end up becoming social pariahs because of what Sal has done. Dirk was this popular guy in sixth form, but something I appreciated about him was that he, for the most part, always chose Sal over everyone else. Like, Dirk would talk to his popular friends but ultimately choose to end up sitting with Sal. Also, at one point, Dirk says he’s going for his driving test, and we find out that he’s failed twice already: one for crashing into a lamppost, and the other for driving into a ditch? Absolutely feral scenes, I don’t know how they let him retake it a third time.

There’s this game that I’ve played recently, Lost in Random, and the narrator of that game gave me very similar vibes to this book. There’s a moment in this book where Pax invites Sal over for tea, but mentions it was his mum that wanted him to come over because she thought Sal was ignoring her. Sal insists that he’s not been ignoring her, but then the narrator overrules Sal and tells us that is exactly what he’s been doing. And that’s where it relates back to Lost in Random, because it’s the idea that the narrator is their own character in a way with their own personality – that’s what it was in the game, and how it felt in this book at times too. Where in the game the narrator appears as a character, in the book they just remain as this omniscient presence, almost like a guide through the book.

Sal is very much used to his own secluded way of life and then when anything came along as some kind of change, he was very resistant to it. We see that he isn’t planning on going to university, and Asha has decided not to go, so that she can support the both of them. She wants to be a journalist (for context) and so she ends up taking this internship at their local paper, which annoys Sal to no end, also in part due to this reporter wanting to write an article on their house, which obviously goes very against the way Sal wants to live his life. And also, since he’s not used to the kind of attention that Pax gives him, when they get closer, he doesn’t realise the feelings that grow between them are what normal people have.

I will say that the blurb gave me, like, nothing to go on before reading this book. Weirdly, in a way, I think that’s the best way to go into this book. I went on Goodreads after reading it to log it as read and found myself going down to some of the reviews as I have a habit of doing after I’ve read. A few of them were saying the book that they ended up reading wasn’t what it ended up being billed as. And I think that because the blurb on the copy I have says next to nothing, it meant I had no expectations of what I was getting. The Amazon listing calls it a spooky, LGBTQ+ romance, and that I can see throwing people off. I bought it from the Waterstones website, which says nothing. This book definitely does have a romance in it and given what the blurb says about Sal and Pax, you can tell it’s between them. I just don’t think that the romance is what the book is about. I wouldn’t specifically call it a romance book. The line of the blurb that reads, “Can they banish their ghosts…”, that’s what I’d say the book is about more than the romance.

I think because I didn’t really know what I was getting into, I was able to appreciate the plot of Sal and his mother, and then his father being dead. I didn’t have any expectations and was able to just take everything as it came. Throughout this book you do see why and how Sal and Asha’s house is haunted, and specifically what it is that’s haunting it. I think not knowing was the right thing for me, because then I had less to complain about when everything was finally revealed to me. Because I wasn’t expecting anything specific, whenever anything happened, there was nothing that was outwardly wrong, if that makes sense? If I had one thing I wanted more of, it would have been Pax and his relation to ghosts and the weird. I wanted to know why he was so interested in all of this, and why he was so obsessed with Sal’s haunted house. Was it that he just wanted to see a ghost or something paranormal? I know he said that he thought that all ghost and witch-y stuff was cool, so I do wonder whether it was just that, but there was definitely part of me that wondered whether there was something else. To credit the book, Pax does have a lot of things like crystals and sage before he even meets Sal, so it could well have been that he was just into that stuff, and honestly? If that was the answer, then that’s good enough for me. If he likes it, then he likes it.

And for my final point, I felt like Dirk and Elsie didn’t really have much of a plot, Dirk especially. I understand that Dirk and Elsie were side characters to Sal. If I were to rank where they were presence-wise: Sal would be first, Pax second, then Dirk and Elsie would be joint third. I did think for a bit that the two of them would have ended up getting together. I understand that not everyone needs to have a plot, but Dirk was sort of just there. Don’t get me wrong, I still liked him, and he had a good standout personality. And I also don’t think that every side character in a novel needs to have a plot line to them, it was more just the fact that since the blurb mentioned him and Elsie by name, I kind of expected the two of them to have something more than they had.

Anyway, I really liked this book. I think had I gone into it expecting romance then I might have been a little more disappointed like some of the Goodreads reviews. But I think if you go into it reading just the blurb like I did, then you’ll have a much better time, as I did.

Okay, bye!