Seven high school friends, all considered outcasts in one way or another, calling themselves The Underground, gather for a last senior year send-off. They decide to party at the foreboding plantation mansion of the one rich outcast. Ready to kick it with sex, drugs, and rock ‘n’ roll, a fight breaks out among them, and one of their number spikes the make-up wine with acid. The evening, naturally, descends into a hellish nightmare, with all manner of hallucinatory apparitions. Unfortunately for the group, the apparitions are actually real ghosts, and one of the tripped out kids goes missing through a mirror into what is eventually discovered to be a supernatural world of the dead, uninspired and unsurprisingly, called the Underworld.

Jump ahead to the present day and one of the kids, all grown up and just out of prison, returns to the mansion, which is now a tourist attraction, and jumps through a mirror thanks to some incantations. His mission was to look for his girlfriend, lost all their years ago in the Underworld, but sadly his rescue mission is interrupted and the mirror closes. Leaving behind his living hand, thus stranding him in Underworld. The rich kid, now adult, gathers the group back together for their own rescue attempt.

If I sound bored, then read Underground and you try not to sound bored while describing it.

What little good Underground has going for it is practically picked apart to the bones by cliché after cliché, and then those bones are cremated and scattered over an overflowing septic tank of lackluster ideas. The good and interesting ideas in here can’t compete with the rest of offal. Comments on race relations and class in America are too obvious an attempt by the author to make a point and deliver a message If you are a casual fan of the ghost story, and have never read a good one, you may find something here to interest you. If you have ever read anything as remote as McBroom’s Ghost, then skip Underground.

My score: 1.5 out of 5

the_novacula