The second book of Terry Pratchett’s “Johnny Maxwell” trilogy, Johnny and the Dead sees twelve-year-old Johnny and his friends battling to try to save the local graveyard.
Johnny Maxwell is using a shortcut through the local cemetery to reach his home, when he meets the spirit of Alderman Thomas Bowler. This meeting shows Johnny he has the ability to see and speak to the dead and soon Johnny meets the other deceased occupants of the cemetery.
When a massive progress-obsessed conglomerate buys the neglected cemetery as a new construction site, the only people more dismayed than the living inhabitants of Blackbury are the dead ones. But stopping a big corporation from building office buildings there will be no easy task.
Someone should have told the council the dead are not going to take it lying down . . . especially since it’s Halloween tomorrow.
The book has also been made into a 1995 TV serial starring Andrew Falvey as Johnny.