It Is an Honest Ghost
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- $10.99
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- $10.99
Publisher Description
From Kenya to Quebec, these wry and unconventional stories explore the different ways we’re haunted ...
Teenagers philosophize on the nature of ontology while fearing there's a ghost in the old mill they're stuck in; a man encounters an old friend in the unlikeliest of places; nineteenth-century inventor Sigismund Mohr is vividly brought back from obscurity; and two journalists travel to Kenya for a conference, where one of them has a paranoid breakdown.
It Is an Honest Ghost is a funny and often eerie collection that explores what lies beyond mortality – if anything, that is.
'A thrilling collection: hot-headed, existential, crystalline. Goldbach’s novella Hic et Ubique illuminates the nightmare of being a man in this world -- the twisted, spiritual conversion of buddy into warrior. This book is cadenced and visionary.'
– Tamara Faith Berger
'Searching and restless, a new Goldbach story is a thing to celebrate. A whole collection of them? A Mardi Gras of mischievous goodness. This fiction slays hearts in the most wondrous of ways.'
– Jeff Parker
Praise for The Devil and the Detective:
'The world has hitherto been divided into plotters who wrote in shoddy sentences and linguistic aesthetes who wrote beautiful sentences but couldn't make anything happen on the page, no plot. Goldbach manages to do both – a thrilling plot and beautiful language. He has raised the bar for both murder mysteries and literary writing.'
– Josip Novakovich
'Mr. Goldbach will be a fun writer to watch. Check him out.'
– Padgett Powell
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Goldbach's (Selected Blackouts) second short fiction collection deftly explores a multitude of personalities and anxieties. In "An Old Story: In Five Parts," vignettes reveal a man slave to his isolationist routines. The title story tracks a group of young men whose conversation regarding the strange happenings at a 200-year-old flourmill devolves into an acid-fuelled discussion of metaphysics and the transmigration of souls. Two stories "A Girl with a Dragon Tattoo" and "Jenny" are almost entirely dialogue driven: the former involves two high school friends reconnecting at a strip club after many years apart; the latter is a one-sided transcription of a truly awful first date. "Standing in Front of the Kazon Cathedral: St. Petersburg, Russia, 2005" is the strongest piece a work of flash fiction, it's a near-perfect distillation of the branching, rapid-fire thoughts of an anxiety-ridden mind as a man, while staring up at the sky, imagines being captured and killed as part of a terrorist action. Two stories, however, don't fit with the rest. "Sigismund Mohr: The Man Who Brought Electricity to Quebec" and the novella "Hic et Ubique" feel more emotionally detached and less introspective than the others. Additionally, the novella's weight throws off the collection's balance its tone and heft don't belong, and so the book limps to its end after a decidedly strong start.
