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Synopsis
“I envy anyone who has yet to enjoy the sexy, eerie, and addictive novels of Jonathan Carroll. They are delicious treats—with devilish tricks inside them.”—Michael Dirda, The Washington Post Neil Gaiman has written: “Jonathan Carroll has the magic. He’ll lend you his eyes, and you’ll never see the world in quite the same way ever again.”
Welcome to the luminous and marvelously inventive world of The Ghost in Love. A man falls in the snow, hits his head on a curb, and dies. But something strange occurs: the man doesn’t die, and the ghost that’s been sent to take his soul to the afterlife is flabbergasted. 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. We want you to stay with this man to help us figure out what’s going on. The ghost agrees unhappily; it is a ghost, not a nursemaid. But a funny thing happens—the ghost falls madly in love with the man’s girlfriend, and things naturally get complicated. Soon afterward, the man discovers he did not die when he was “supposed” to because for the first time in their history, human beings have decided to take their fates back from the gods. It’s a wonderful change, but one that comes at a price. 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 yourselfat twenty different ages. Stephen King has said that “Jonathan Carroll is as scary as Hitchcock, when he isn’t being as funny as Jim Carrey.” Jonathan Lethem sees Carroll as the “master of sunlit surrealism.” However one regards this beguiling original, two facts are indisputable: It’s tough being a ghost on an empty stomach. And The Ghost in Love is a triumphant return.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.