The Ghost in Love » (Reprint)

Jonathan Carroll's novel The Wooden Sea was named a New York Times Notable Book of 2001. He is the author of such acclaimed novels as White Apples, The Land of Laughs, The Marriage of Sticks, and Bones of the Moon. He lives in Vienna, Austria.

A man falls in the snow, hits his head on a stone curb and dies. A ghost that's been sent to take his soul to the Afterlife arrives just as he falls. But something strange occurs: the man doesn't die. The ghost is flabbergasted. This is unprecedented. Going immediately to its boss, the ghost asks, what should I do now? The boss says, we don't know how this happened but we're working on it. In the meantime, we want you to stay with this man and watch to see if he does anything that might help us figure out what's going on.

Unhappily, the ghost agrees. It is a ghost, not a nursemaid. The last thing it wants to do is hang around watching a human being walk through his every day. But a funny thing happens—the ghost falls truly madly deeply in love with the man's girlfriend and things get complicated. The Ghost in Love is about what happens to us when we discover that we have become the masters of our own fate. No excuses, no outside forces or gods to blame—the responsibility is all our own. It's also about love, ghosts that happen to be gourmet cooks, talking dogs, and picnicking in the rain with yourself at twenty different ages.

It's tough being a ghost on an empty stomach.

The Barnes & Noble Review

Jonathan Carroll's novels give new meaning to the idea that readers must "suspend their disbelief." In them dogs talk, people travel effortlessly between present and past moments in their lives, and ghosts and angels are ubiquitous. Submitting to this experience is like watching a film by David Lynch or listening to the ambient soundtracks of Brian Eno -- characters do unpredictable things, worlds seems to morph in and out of each other -- and Carroll's writing, which is sometimes classified as fantasy, sometimes as science fiction or horror, inspires similar extremes of devotion and discomfort in readers. You either delight in entering a universe where nothing makes sense and comprehension is less important than a willingness to be taken for a wild ride, or you turn away, frustrated that there is nowhere to get a foothold in this surreal and shifting landscape.