Lola: A Ghost Story
A critically acclaimed middle-grade graphic novel rooted in Filipino folklore about a boy who inherits his grandmother's gift—and curse—of seeing ghosts.
📖 Oni Press • Started 2009
Some ghosts are inherited.
Jesse barely knew his Lola—the Tagalog word for grandmother. The one memory he carries is a nightmare: she tried to drown him when he was a baby. Now she’s gone, and his family is flying across the ocean to the Philippines for her funeral. Whispers trail behind them. Lola had visions, they say. She wrestled monsters from Filipino folklore under the moonlight. She could see ghosts, talk to them, even defy them. Jesse always figured those were just stories—the kind families tell to keep children close and quiet. But as the humid air of his ancestral homeland wraps around him and strange shapes flicker at the edge of his vision, he’s about to learn the devastating truth: those stories were never stories at all. And Lola’s gift—her curse—has passed to him.
Written by Shuster Award-winning J. Torres (Alison Dare, Teen Titans Go!, Batman) and illustrated with haunting warmth by Elbert Or, Lola: A Ghost Story (published by Oni Press ) is a masterwork of quiet horror and deep family emotion. Originally released in 2009 and reissued in a 2020 tenth-anniversary edition with a revised ending and updated artwork, it swept up starred reviews from Kirkus, School Library Journal, and Booklist—along with an Aesop Accolade from the American Folklore Society for the way it weaves Philippine folklore into a story that aches with universal truth.
Or’s artwork performs a kind of magic trick. His characters are drawn with soft, rounded lines—open faces, gentle eyes, the kind of warmth that makes you feel safe. That’s exactly why the horror lands like a punch. When Jesse’s visions seep in—a decaying hand reaching from shadow, a hollow-eyed figure standing too still, the rot blooming beneath the skin of the everyday—the contrast is devastating. This isn’t a story built on gore; it’s the slow, creeping dread of a child realizing the world is far stranger and more dangerous than any adult ever admitted. As Snow Wildsmith wrote for School Library Journal , “Torres and Or’s tale is the sort of quiet horror story that moves along simply, lulling you into false security, before twisting quickly in another direction right at the end.”
And what a world to be lulled into. The story is steeped in the living mythology of the Philippines—the kapre, a cigar-smoking giant the size of a tree, watches from the branches above. Tiyanak, the shape-shifting wraiths that mimic the cries of infants, haunt abandoned farmhouses. Even pigs possessed by the devil make a nightmarish appearance. But these creatures are not just electrifying set pieces; they are the folklore that shaped Lola’s life, the monsters she fought across a lifetime, and the legacy Jesse must now shoulder. As he navigates a family fractured by grief—an inconsolable aunt, an uncle still mourning a son, and the ghost of a young cousin who refuses to move on—Jesse discovers that Lola’s true gift was never about seeing the dead. It was about helping the living heal.
Perfect for fans of The Graveyard Book, Anya’s Ghost, and The Witch Boy—and anyone who’s ever felt haunted by the stories they inherited.
