This goth chick is a pretty good time

The Ghost Writer
John Harwood

John Harwood has achieved something I’ve long been waiting for: a story that chills for being spooky at the same time it pleases for being well written. What a novel idea! The Ghost Writer is an engaging tale told in the tradition of Henry James, and sure enough, allusions to The Turn of the Screw and Dickens enhance the novel. To be sure, The Ghost Writer contains far more than meets the eye.

Speaking of which, there lies my only complaint: not with the book, but rather with its packaging. Was this the best they could do? Where did this goth chick come from? The cover does a poor job of illustrating the novel’s essence by failing to portray the depth of the tale contained therein. Should one judge by appearances alone, a great novel would be missed.

(Not to beat a dead horse, but here and here are two others and I don’t see why a change for the worse was necessary when these two speak perfectly to the novel without being hokey. Okay I'm done.)

The Ghost Writer explores the coming-of-age of one Gerard Freeman as he seeks to understand his mother’s history, a history that has been kept from him his entire life. Gerard’s first memory is of sneaking around in his mother’s room and finding some hidden papers in the bottom of a drawer. He had just begun to read when his mother descends, delivering a rapacious beating for snooping. Gerard wants to know more about his mother’s life in England and her reasons for moving to Australia, but she steadfastly refuses to answer his questions beyond what little she has allowed him to know.

What Gerard does know is precious little: that his mother, Phyllis, was an orphan, her parents killed in an accident when she was a little girl. That Phyllis was raised by her grandmother, Viola. That Viola had been a writer of ghost stories. The novel's action artfully weaves these truly creepy supernatural tales with letters from Alice, a childhood penpal who was paralyzed and orphaned in a horrible accident in England. With his only friend half a world away, Gerard lives a lonely life, consumed by his desire to know his past.

The novel suspensefully chronicles Gerard's search for the truth and provides plenty of spooks along the way; I stayed awake long into the night just to finish it, vowing not to go to bed until I had learned all its secrets. And while I anticipated a couple of plot points, there was enough I hadn’t seen coming to leave me feeling satisfied. In fact, it's really a work that bears a second reading after all the facts are known.

In a nutshell: Smart and spooky. It's a go here.

Bibliolatry Scale: 5.5 out of 6 stars