Review by Frank Plowright

While Elle Petersen’s friends and family visit her comatose body in hospital, her spirit is trapped in a place known as the Garden, where she can see the real world and, as at the end of Intimate Strangers, temporarily possess the bodies of those whose spirits are departing.

Wish You Were Here opens with Elle’s consciousness inhabiting the body of a ten year old, and the disbelief and chaos it causes. Jim McCann has also established something’s fishy about the doctor overseeing Elle’s treatment, and now possibly with her mother also, with Elle’s family being extremely wealthy. We’ve also seen others manipulating events. Further complications include Elle’s boyfriend Dane arrested for her ‘accident’ and Dane’s worthless father who’s hanging around after being contacted and used.

Dan McDaid draws a very different looking interlude section in which Elle’s best friend Jo makes a couple of startling discoveries, but most of the art is again the polished naturalism supplied by Rodin Esquejo. He’s unable to draw an unattractive looking person, even in the case of the irredeemable, but brings the cast to life without any exaggeration, rooting them in a recognisable reality ensuring everything remains disturbing.

Much of Wish You Were Here seems a placeholder, with McCann drip feeding small amounts of information while generating a continuing sense of panic around the hospital where Elle sleeps, and a convincingly sinister mood as he tours the cast. However, if the final chapter doesn’t quite blow the bloody doors off, it certainly reconfigures what we think about a couple of people without revealing every detail and supplies the bigger picture. It’s a viable idea, and if the final statement cliffhanger is unnecessarily melodramatic, it also does the job of pulling readers into Out of Bodies.

This doesn’t quite hold the shock value of the opening volume, but remains intriguing.