The Ghost Variations
One Hundred Stories
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- $4.99
Publisher Description
Ghost stories tap into our most primal emotions as they encourage us to confront the timeless question: What comes after death? Here, in tales that are by turn scary, funny, philosophic, and touching, you’ll find that question sharpened, split, reconsidered—and met with a multitude of answers.
A spirit who is fated to spend eternity reliving the exact moment she lost her chance at love, ghostly trees that haunt the occupant of a wooden house, specters that snatch anyone who steps into the shadows, and parakeets that serve as mouthpieces for the dead: these are just a few of the characters in this extraordinary compendium of one hundred ghost stories. Kevin Brockmeier’s fiction has always explored the space between the fantastical and the everyday with profundity and poignancy. As in his previous books, The Ghost Variations discovers new ways of looking at who we are and what matters to us, exploring how mysterious, sad, strange, and comical it is to be alive—or, as it happens, not to be.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Brockmeier (The Illumination) imagines the vicissitudes of the afterlife and the phenomena that haunt the living in this sonorous collection of 100 brief stories. In "The Office of Hereafters and Dissolutions," a ghost is hounded by a series of celestial clerical errors. First, he is repeatedly billed an already-paid $25 fee to earn the right to haunt Earth. Then, his birth certificate is postdated by a millennium, and "the genial middle-aged man ceased not only to be but ever yet to have been." In "Every House Key, Every Fire Hydrant, Every Electrical Outlet," a toddler sees the faces of the dead in wall sockets. In "Dusk and Other Stories," a poltergeist communicates with a retired publisher by disturbing books on a shelf with such titles as The Household Spirit. Not every story contains a ghost. The children in "The Sandbox Initiative" are haunted by "the tang of salt air and the blood sound of waves" on oceans they've yet to see. In "The Census," a highlight, Brockmeier imagines God's alarm at the disproportionate number of ghosts in the world compared to living people, and makes some adjustments, including turning himself into a spirit ("The majority of theologians regard this as His most impressive feat to date," the narrator wryly concludes). Brockmeier's luminous sentences and potent metaphors animate the phantasmagorical material. These eloquent dispatches show the writer's remarkable range.
