When first-person narration is discussed in literary circles, the subject of unreliable narrators often crops up. Should you believe everything the narrator tells you or not?

In Matt Haig's 2006 novel “The Dead Fathers Club,” there is no question but that the narrator is unreliable. Philip Noble is just 11 years old, and how many 11-year-olds really understand everything that is going on around them? His father has just died in a traffic accident, making the boy emotionally unstable. As the story unfolds it appears Philip may have psychiatric problems in addition to the current stress.
Told in a stream-of-consciousness style, the story finds Philip haunted by his father's ghost. The ghost, part of a dead fathers club in the spirit world, tells Philip he was murdered by his brother because Uncle Alan wants both the boy's mother and the pub the dead man had owned and where Philip and his mother live. The ghost tells Philip he must kill Uncle Alan within 77 days.

Philip's struggles to obey his father's ghost against his own conscience. The fact that Uncle Alan quickly moves into his mother's bedroom and takes over management of the pub strengthens the boy's commitment to actually commit the murder. Yet how can an 11-year-old boy kill a man and get away with it?

Readers may find a hint of Shakespeare's Hamlet in this novel, yet Haig's work remains strikingly original. ( )

the lack of questioning by most of the characters in this book really disturbed me, especially when you consider that this retelling of hamlet made the hamlet character 11 years old. that said, i really liked the character of phillip and thought he had a really strong voice, especially since the lack of correct grammar and punctuation accurately mimicked the excited speech of childhood. comparisons of this book with "the curious incident of the dog in the night-time" seem strange to me -- the boy in that novel was autistic and that determined the story and made it very specific. the boy in this novel is a thoughtful nerdy kid with a lot on his mind. he is socially awkward, naive, troubled and confused, and these are the things that made him seem so real to me. what bothered me the most, though, was that the book embraced a moral ambiguity that left me feeling a little shaken. if the lesson of hamlet is "he who hesitates is lost," the lesson of this book, if there is one, is "eh, whatever. do whatever you want." ( )

I finished this... should have been a DNF for me but I have a really hard time doing that. I guess it boils down to the writing style and narration. I am, apparently, addicted to punctuation. I need quotation marks in the dialog, and I need freaking commas! I get that madness was being portrayed. I do. But man I had trouble with this one.

I still very much want to read this author's other work. The Midnight Library is on my TBR and I am looking forward to it. I've read the first 2 chapters and am very intrigued. I also know there is punctuation. So there's that. ( )

A fresh, original take on Hamlet. Excellent performance on the audiobook, by a young man the age of the narrator. ( )

Written partially in a stream-of-consciousness style, partly just like a young teen might think-write (and without apostrophes or quotation marks), this is a modern-day version of Hamlet. It is not identical to Shakespeare's play, but certainly based on the play and contains many obvious and subtle references (former: protagonist's father has died and the ghost visits his son; latter: names like the fish, Gertie after Gertrude in the play). The style of writing is not unlike The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime but less on the spectrum. It is quirky but it works really well. Clearly it was carefully crafted, and the stress, horror, conflict of the characters shines through with showing, not telling. Very emotional and clever. It has its own ending and leaves much of the interpreting to the reader. Brilliant. ( )