The Haunted One

by Jay Bennett

It starts out as a perfect summer for eighteen-year-old Paul Barrett. A championship swimmer, he lands a plum job as a lifeguard on a beach at a New Jersey resort. It gets even better when he meets the beautiful Jody Miller, a ballet dancer on vacation. In fact, it's love at first sight....

But all that changes the day he sees Jody, crying out to him for help far out beyond the breakers.

Time is running out. He can't reach her. Not today, not ever. But Jody can reach him -- on the phone, on the street, at the beach.

And Paul is about to become...

The Haunted One

192 pages, Mass Market Paperback

First published January 1, 1989

About the author

Jay Bennett (born in New York City, December 24, 1912, died June 27, 2009 in Cherry Hill, NJ) was an American author and two-time winner of the Edgar Award from the Mystery Writers of America. Bennett won the Edgar for Best Juvenile novel in 1974 and 1975, for The Long Black Coat (Delacorte Press) and The Dangling Witness (Delacorte Press), respectively. He was the first author to win an Edgar in consecutive years. A third book, The Skeleton Man (Franklin Watts), was nominated in 1987. Bennett is best known among English teachers and young adults for these and other juvenile mysteries, like Deathman, Do Not Follow Me (Scholastic).

Reviews

[Jfeliz4184 · Rating 3 out of 5]

The book "The Haunted One" is almost like an abnormal love story between a lifeguard and a victim who drowned under his watch. Her name was Jody Miller and she was beautiful according to the story. She was a ballet dancer on vacation at the beach that Paul was supervising. Unfortunately, she had gotten too far past the breakers and Paul was unable to reach her. It wasn't a surprise that the girl that Paul allegedly fell in love with at first sight haunted him after her death. This also is the reason the book is named what it is referring to Paul as the one being haunted. This traumatic event leads to as far as Paul hallucinating about Jody and just constantly thinking about what he could've done different to try and save her. I'm not much of a romance or love story kind of guy but I do enjoy spooky or creepy stories. This book was a good mix of both and therefore I recommend it to anyone looking for a short but good book to read.

[Rob Imes · Rating 2 out of 5]

THE HAUNTED ONE by Jay Bennett was a "Young Adult/Suspense" novel (as it says on the spine) published by Fawcett Juniper (Fawcett's YA imprint) in May 1989, although the book has a 1987 copyright date. It's a thin book, only 136 pages, and the plot is pretty thin, too -- filled out by a lot of padding and repetition in the text. The novel is split into three parts, with a total of 40 chapters, although some chapters are only a page long. In the first part of the book, an 18 year old lifeguard named Paul meets a young woman around his age named Jody. There is a sense of impending doom about their brief encounters, as Paul senses that their relationship can't last. (The book is told from the omniscient third person perspective, but Paul's thoughts and POV are meshed within it.) By the end of Part One, Jody has drowned and Paul failed to save her, perhaps because he was smoking a joint at the time, which he shouldn't have been doing. Part Two deals with Paul's guilt over Jody's death and her apparent return from the grave to torment him. By the last page of Part Two (page 109 of the book), I was able to guess the identity of the culprit. Part Three of the book has the big reveal, the return of an earlier character, and wraps things up. Unfortunately the ending is not quite as satisfying as it could have been, leaving some unanswered questions. It's an easy read, with a couple spooky parts, but not as spooky or scary as the cover would suggest. I rate it only 2.5 stars, mainly due to the repetitive, dialogue-heavy, padded-out writing style. If more stuff had happened, then it probably would have rated higher with me.

[L Moore · Rating 4 out of 5]

Great middle school ghost story. Quick read. Will pull at your heart strings and give you a chill too.