Milrose Munce is one of those books that make you question why you ever decided on getting professional help in the first place.

Milrose Munce is one of those books that make you question why you ever decided on getting professional help in the first place.

Mirose is joined by Arabella, another student who can speak to the dead. Both are social outcasts who enjoy the company of the science and art communities.

Author Douglas Cooper is wellknown in the US for his macabre travel stories that won him the Lowell Thomas Gold Medal and the Canadian National Magazine Award.

This is how he describes his first novel, Amnesia.

"Amnesia remains my last innocent attempt to create something beautiful."

Once I read that I totally understood where the darkness that permeates the pages of Milrose Munce came from.

Some of the spectres that Milrose encounters include Cryogenic Kelvin, who froze horribly and shattered into ice cubes, and Deeply Damaged Dave, whose fascination with explosions led to his final demise.

Milrose is enlightened by these ghostly apparitions and relies less on the lessons he learns in the classroom than he does on the quirky conversations he has with the dead.

Yet speaking to air and patting air on the back is not something that would pass as normal behaviour, not even in a school where an aspiring poet once tried to fake his death but ended up poisoning himself.

So Milrose and Arabella are sent for professional help in the form of Massimo Natica, a psychologist who's sans the required qualifications. His office is situated in the ghost-free first floor and it's reached by turning left where you cannot turn left.

Natica's nefarious ways are well chronicled among the dead and the two luckless students have their hands full. To say anything more would give away probably one of the funniest books I've read this year.