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 yourself at 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.
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Jonathan Carroll
Jonathan Carroll was born in 1949 in New York City. He graduated from university in 1971 and got married in the same year. He moved to Vienna, Austria a few years later and began teaching. His first novel was The Land of Laughs (1980).
Carroll's short story, ”Friend's Best Man”, won a World Fantasy Award. Carroll's work has been short-listed for that award, the Hugo, and the British Fantasy Award, which he won for the novel Outside the Dog Museum. His collection of short-stories, The Panic Hand, won the Bram Stoker Award in 1995 for Best Collection.
Links
Home page.
Jonathan Carroll. Wikipedia.
