Johnny and the Dead

Johnny and the Dead is a fantasy novel for children by the English writer Terry Pratchett, published in 1993. It is the second of the three novels about Johnny Maxwell.

The book begins with Johnny Maxwell, a twelve-year-old boy, cutting through the local Blackbury cemetery to get home, where he meets the spirit of Alderman Thomas Bowler and realises that he can see and speak to the dead. The others buried there object to the word ghost, and they have reason to be worried: the council has sold the neglected cemetery to a faceless developer, and their home is about to be taken from them. Johnny and his friends become involved in the campaign to save it, negotiating with the dead on one side and the council on the other. The story sits between Only You Can Save Mankind, published in 1992, and Johnny and the Bomb, published in 1996, and it has been used in some schools as part of the English curriculum. It was republished in 2006.

Pratchett wrote the Johnny Maxwell books for younger readers, and the series places ordinary children in situations where something impossible has to be dealt with sensibly.