The book follows an eleven-year-old boy (Phillip) who sees his father's ghost. It turns out that only people who are murdered become ghosts and Phillip is the only person who can help his dad to get revenge and rest in peace. As if his grief, the school bullies, a new girlfriend and melting fish aren't enough to deal with. It's a tangled web of murder and lies, told with the dark humour that Matt's readers expect. Matt draws on his own childhood memories to help portray Phillip convincingly, but he has also experimented with the writing style to draw the reader into the world of an eleven year old. He confesses he's the type of person who spots misplaced apostrophes in shop signs, but Matt felt this style was important to the book. "It's not supposed to be him writing but inside his mind speaking. The lack of punctuation was a way of speeding everything up and expressing his breathlessness."
Although the main character is a young boy, Matt says the book is not particularly aimed at children. Like his previous book (The Last Family In England, where the main character was a pet dog) he hopes it will have an appeal to a wide audience including older children and adults alike. "A lot of literary types think there's a 'dumbing down' going on in fiction. Difficult writers like Martin Amis used to be the most popular literature. But that's changed. With clubs like Richard and Judy's book club, people want something, not completely brain dead, but accessible. That doesn't mean it's not intelligent, just that people get it. There's a skill in making things accessible just as there is skill in making things highbrow." Hopefully we will be seeing Matt's stories on the big screen soon - the film rights to Last Family have been optioned by Brad Pitt's film company Plan B/Paramount and the film rights to Dead Fathers Club have also been sold, this time to Harry Potter producer David Heyman. He's also finished a children's novel - Shadow Forest - due for publication in 2007 and has another novel and children's book in the pipeline. Things are definitely busy at the moment for Matt.
Dead Fathers Club is published on 1 June 2006. | 
