Spoilers here. No, really.

Even though it’s Jacob Marley who really kicks off the action in Charles Dickens’ enduring classic A Christmas Carol, the miserable old ghost is not considered to be among the more memorable characters in the story. Dickens himself more or less forgets about Marley -- he comes in, he says his piece, and he disappears, never to be heard from again -- and even here at Geek Speak, when someone (cough) submitted a roundup of Christmas Carols last December, that individual (ahem) needed to be reminded by her editor of Marley’s very existence. He just can’t get any respect. (Well, except for in A Muppet Christmas Carol. Statler + Waldorf = automatic brilliance.)

Now, author R. William Bennett has arrived on the scene to rectify this sad state of affairs. With Jacob T. Marley, he re-tells the popular fable from the titular Marley’s point of view. It’s an interesting take on a well-known tale (even if Bennett didn’t get there first)…but how does it stack up against all of the other Christmas Carols out there?

Well…

Bennett’s Marley starts out as an ordinary kid from an ordinary family, except he has an exceptional head for numbers. One dark day, a teacher innocently tells him that he’s the best young mathematician he (the teacher, that is) has ever encountered. Jacob is struck by the idea that he could be the best at anything, and the seed of pride, once planted in him, quickly grows to full flower. As an adult, Jacob repudiates his family and turns his full attention to making a buck, little caring whose lives he devastates along the way. Eventually, while stuck behind a funeral procession, he meets an arrogant young shit named Ebenezer Scrooge -- for whose sister’s death he is responsible, having evicted her and her husband from their abode on a cold night when she was extremely pregnant. In Scrooge he recognizes a kindred spirit (if Scrooge cares that Marley killed his sister, he doesn’t talk about it), and the two men become business partners, living only to outdo one another in avarice, malice, and coldness.

Eventually, Marley dies, but at the moment of death he repents, and the thing he regrets most is not pimp-slapping the bad attitude out of his protégé. (I may be paraphrasing things a bit here.) The spirits in the otherworld agree to let him try to bring Scrooge back into the fold, if he can. Do you think he can do it?

You know most of the story from here: Scrooge is visited by three more spirits, who tell him blah blah blah. Meanwhile, Marley, unseen, witnesses all three interactions. In fact, in Bennett’s novel, the spirits are communicating telepathically with Marley even as they’re talking with Scrooge. This is actually the most boring (and bizarre) stretch of the novel, as everybody already knows what happens, and Bennett’s attempts to inject suspense into the proceedings by having the spirits say things like “If Scrooge doesn’t accept what we’re saying, he will DIE, and he DOESN’T SEEM TO BE GETTING IT, oh noez,” etc., fall pretty flat. But of course Scrooge does buy a clue, and we as readers are rewarded with a brief synopsis of Ebenezer’s subsequent career, including – SPOILER! – his reunion with Marley in the sweet hereafter.

Look, only a churl would note that the ending threatens the reader with sugar shock, or would dare suggest that the entire enterprise is slight and largely unnecessary. This book is plainly a labor of deep love, so I won’t bring bad karma upon myself by doing any of that. I will say that Bennett has mastered a certain Victorian-ness of tone; the book reads like a nineteenth century work, and it has a cozy, nostalgic flavor about it. Also, I kind of dig the idea of Scrooge and Marley re-partnering in the afterlife to bring stubbornly resistant souls to the light, and I think that the Family Channel should option that idea for a TV series soonest. (Michael Emerson and Terry O’Quinn can star.) Finally, this is a bit cheesy, but I really like the cover of this thing.

Christmas Carol fans – this isn’t as good as the original. Or the aforementioned Muppet Christmas Carol. Or A Klingon Christmas Carol. Or the WRKP Christmas episode (an unsung classic). But it’s not bad, and if you’re just dying to know more about literature’s most egregiously forgotten ghost, you’ll certainly want to read Jacob T. Marley.

   -- Kate Nagy