The ghost variations One hundred stories

Review by Booklist Review

Brockmeier's 100 extremely short ghost stories present a range in tone from unsettling to terrifying, and pack a fearful punch with an economy of language, even for readers primed to feel uneasy. Despite the episodic format, the book as a whole is cohesive, with stories thoughtfully organized into categories such as "Ghosts and Family" or "Ghosts and Belief" that help frame the entire book. This is no gimmick; Brockmeier doubles down on these groupings, including a compendium after the last story which places the tales into different thematic areas such as ghosts and plants, animals, or technology. Readers could use this index to go back and encounter the stories in a whole new order for a completely different, but equally enjoyable, experience. The tales themselves are gems: modern, haunted treasures to be discovered no matter the order in which they are read. A great option for those who enjoy horror flash fiction like in Tiny Nightmares (2020), edited by Lincoln Michel and Nadxieli Nieto, and readers who want modern takes on the classic ghost story tradition as seen in Echoes (2019), edited by Ellen Datlow.

From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.

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Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

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. (Oct.)

(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

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Review by Kirkus Book Review

Brockmeier's latest is a collection of 100 tiny tales, each precisely two pages long. But these ghost stories do their haunting in a wide variety of tones and moods and modes. These miniatures aren't always long on narrative. Many are thought experiments, meditations, fables, allegories, head-of-a-pin paintings. What unites them is first and foremost Brockmeier's questing sensibility, a fascination with abstract ideas that find form in fiction the way spirit is said to find form in phantasm. The book's central idea, it seems, is that death is a permeable membrane--indeed, it's here crossed casually and constantly, from every side and in every conceivable way. The dead aren't dead, nor is alive the other half of a simple binary. Instead, Brockmeier's world has a perpetual hum of oddity, a numinous glow. He's a master of defamiliarizing the everyday, of what the Russians call "making strange." Uncanny and unsettling but also consistently amusing, the book shares a title with Robert Schumann's tortured final work but not that work's tone. Pachyderms overhear a scientist's recording of a dead friend and--fooled by this aural ghost--search the savanna for her ("Elephants"); a commercial logger with a mania for clear-cutting finds that it extends into the afterlife ("A Blight on the Landscape"); a woman communicates with her dead lover by way of their mingled aromas ("Bouquet"). One minor disappointment: It seems that, perhaps to make this feel more like a novel and less like an anthology, Brockmeier has created an elaborate organizational schema. Not only is the book divided into 11 thematic sections ("Ghosts and Time," "Ghosts and Love and Friendship," and so on), but there's also a 20-plus-page "Partial Concordance of Themes." Ultimately this apparatus seems labored, clunky--but that minor flaw doesn't detract much. Varied, inventive, uncanny, and playful: a gifted fabulist's cabinet of curiosities, his book-length memento mori. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

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SEVENTY A MAN IN THE MIRROR That woman in the owl-eye glasses leads a life of secrecy and ritual. In the morning before she leaves for work, and in the evening before she goes to sleep, she always spends two hours staring into the mirror by her front door: four hours total, each and every day, without fail. For years this has been her habit, though not, as you might suspect, because she loves her own reflection. Her nose roosts too low on her face, for one thing. Her chin is too broad and bony. And her freckles, once her best feature, have gone gray along with her hair. No, when she addresses the mirror, she does so at an angle, gazing not at herself but past herself. Some years ago, on her way out the door, she was adjusting the pendant on her necklace when a sudden glassiness of motion caught her eye. At first she mistook it for a flaw in the mirror's silver. Then the flaw startled her by roping its arms over its head and opening its mouth in a helpless yawn, so recognizably human and yet so obviously immaterial that she knew at once that it--that he --was a ghost. Every day since then, as if by appointment, she has watched the ghost's comings and goings. Only in the small Venetian mirror by the front door does she see him, and even then only occasionally, when his activities happen to intersect with the living room, the hallway, or the outermost edge of her kitchen. Now and then he behaves with what seems to be affection toward what seem to be people, knitting his fingers around as if tying a ribbon in someone's hair, for instance, or rocking back and forth as if embracing someone from behind. From this she has judged that he has a wife and daughter, though they have never, as he has, taken shape in the silver. Once, nearly a decade ago, upon a rainy April eight a.m., he approached the mirror to inspect his teeth. He was channeling a fingernail between his incisors when he accidentally met her eyes. For a few seconds, as his face did something curious, her knees locked and her toes began to tingle. Her heart seemed to beat at the same lazy pace as the world. She realized she was in love. Ever since then, she has been waiting for it to happen again. On the first Saturday of each month, the woman in the owl-eye glasses puts on her best silk blouse and her pressed denim skirt and heads out for lunch with her friend the manicurist, who works in a little shop across the street. Last week, over burgers and fries, she almost told her about the ghost. Instead, though, she confessed a different secret altogether: how she fantasizes, and often, about erasing the past fifty years of her life and starting over again, awakening as she used to be, a skinny girl with red hair and freckles, whose decisions had not yet been made, whose rituals had not yet been established, and who could never imagine that fifty years later, in her loneliness and disappointment, she would long to trade her life away. "Are you," her friend asked in a voice of almost unbearable sympathy, "seeing someone?" Excerpted from The Ghost Variations: One Hundred Stories by Kevin Brockmeier All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.

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