THE GHOST WRITER

A ghostwriter collaborates with his literary idol in Warner’s horror novel.

The story begins with an unnerving prologue in which the chief of a volunteer fire department sees a giant beast launch its body at his car. He stumbles out to find a mysterious woman in a green cloak, who says she has a job for him. Before long, he has attacked a woman he used to know, seemingly in a trance. But this is all just a fantasy, scribbled notes from the pen of Martin Knight, an English professor at the University of Iowa. What follows are a series of chapters (each introduced with the subtitle “a novel by Martin Knight”) introducing the reader to a new assistant professor at the university named John Sterling—though he is also referred to as Jack, somewhat interchangeably (and confusingly). Sterling is also a writer and has published a novel inspired by the pulp horror stories of his favorite author, Martin Knight. After a lengthy introduction to Sterling’s family and a series of hallucinatory scenes that may or may not actually be occurring—the assistant professor regularly wakes to find scribbled notes or evidence that some of his dreams are real—Sterling finally meets the legendary Martin Knight and is offered a position as his ghostwriter. In this nesting-doll narrative, the shifting character names and layers of meaning within the story become more than a little confusing. The female characters aren’t particularly well-realized; when they aren’t hectoring the men, they are undoing their bra straps to reveal their “well-endowed bosom[s].” Still, Warner’s lucid prose (“The front door was still closed, but the hole had widened to the size of a dinner plate. Cathy saw the clown’s face peer through the jagged opening, and a white-gloved hand reached inside to feel around for the lock”) generates effective scares.

Engagingly spooky when not lost in the weeds.