All posts tagged: ghosts

Catalytic Ghosts | Regina Marler

Catalytic Ghosts | Regina Marler

Published by Jenni Sidey

In any story by the Scottish writer Ali Smith, you are likely to find a precocious young person who delivers a dose of naked truth, exposing the shams of contemporary mores and politics. You may also find a ghost. These figures often serve as catalysts. They shake other characters awake and chivy them along toward whatever small changes or revelations are possible within the scope of the story. They can be main characters, like the young narrator of Smith’s recent novel Gliff (2024), but more often they turn up unexpectedly, introducing a little wobble in the ongoing narrative, a shade of doubt. Smith’s ghosts can be driven by the needs of their new, changed condition, as in her second novel, Hotel World (2001), or as transient and unassuming as the floating head of a Victorian child that visits an isolated woman in Winter (2017), a Dickensian touch for a Christmas novel. A ghost may resemble the human it once was, but not wholly. The afterlife strips something from us. When a dead lover returns in …

How to Regulate the Ghosts

How to Regulate the Ghosts

Published by Sam Flores

Ghostbusters is a movie about friendship and slime and the specific melting point of giant marshmallows—which makes it easy to forget that it’s also a movie about regulation. The catastrophe at its center begins when Walter Peck (William Atherton), a bureaucrat from the Environmental Protection Agency, visits the basement of the Ghostbusters’ headquarters and finds a machine he does not understand. The nerdy scientist Egon Spengler (Harold Ramis) explains that it’s a containment system; shutting it off would be “like dropping a bomb on the city.” Peck doesn’t believe in ghosts, and he sure doesn’t believe in the Ghostbusters, so he orders an electrician to turn the machine off. The ConEd guy, sensing a risk he doesn’t totally grasp, hesitates. Peck tells him that he’s not interested in his opinion. The switch is pulled. The ghosts escape. The joke, in Ronald Reagan’s 1984, was that government regulation is so stupid that it creates the disaster it exists to prevent. It’s a testament to Reagan’s success that now, in the age of AI, the joke has …

Ghosts of Amrum | J. Hoberman

Ghosts of Amrum | J. Hoberman

Published by Jenni Sidey

The story of Amrum—a German movie about the last days and immediate aftermath of World War II as experienced by a twelve-year-old boy on the isolated North Sea island from which the film takes its title—is both familiar and exotic. Drawn from the autobiographical writings of the actor and filmmaker Hark Bohm, most familiar for his eleven collaborations with R.W. Fassbinder, it centers on the child’s burgeoning recognition of his parents’ sin. Unable to direct it due to his failing health, Bohm, who died at eighty-six a month after Amrum was released in Germany, entrusted the project to the German-born Turkish filmmaker Fatih Akin, whom he had mentored. Although not without violence, Amrum is less excessive than the movies for which the usually rough-and-tumble Akin is known, like Head-On (2004) and The Edge of Heaven (2007), but it continues his longstanding interest in Germany’s outsiders. The people who populate the island Amrum are Frisian, an ethnic group indigenous to Europe’s northwestern coast, from the Netherlands through Germany to southern Denmark. (They make an appearance in …

Chasing Ghosts | Larry Rohter

Chasing Ghosts | Larry Rohter

Published by José Betancourt

At the time of its initial publication in Spanish, José Donoso’s extravagantly grotesque novel The Obscene Bird of Night seemed to lend itself to a primarily political interpretation. It was 1970, and his native Chile was in the throes of the election campaign that resulted that September in the victory of Salvador Allende, the country’s first socialist president, and a sweeping effort to reorder its social and economic structures. Donoso’s novel read easily then as a deliberately outlandish allegory of the centuries of exploitation and oppression that were fueling Allende’s rise, and by the time the book appeared in English in 1973, the situation in Chile had cemented that impression: Allende and the transformation he sought were being besieged by the forces of reaction, and General Augusto Pinochet was soon to launch his bloody coup. A half-century on, in a translation newly revised by Megan McDowell and with material excised from previous American editions now restored, Donoso’s novel registers very differently. A political interpretation is still possible, should one choose to lean in that direction, …

Camino Ghosts by John Grisham

Camino Ghosts by John Grisham

Published by José Betancourt

A Curse from the Past Meets Modern-Day Avarice Some places carry the weight of history like an invisible shroud, whispering secrets of the past to those who listen closely. In John Grisham’s latest novel “Camino Ghosts,” the idyllic shores of Camino Island once again become the backdrop for a gripping tale that blends sun-soaked beaches with long-buried injustices and spectral warnings. As the third installment in Grisham’s Camino Island series, this book plunges readers into a world where the ghosts of slavery collide with the relentless march of coastal development, creating a perfect storm of mystery, legal intrigue, and supernatural unease. The Story Unfolds The novel opens with the joyous wedding of Mercer Mann, a rising literary star, to her boyfriend Thomas on Camino Island’s picturesque beach. But even as champagne flows and well-wishers celebrate, a far more consequential story is brewing just offshore. Bruce Cable, the charismatic and sometimes shady owner of Bay Books, shares with Mercer the tale of Dark Isle – a small, uninhabited barrier island with a haunting history. Dark Isle, …