Dear Reader, Love Author: Annie Barrows
I believe in ghosts. I have tried to stop believing in them, but I have failed. Believing in ghosts has caused me to have some very embarrassing conversations with serious people, but there’s no help for it. It was my upbringing; I was raised on ghost stories. My mother was a great one for tales of deaths foretold by shadowy apparitions and strange creakings of furniture on the anniversary of an untimely demise, but the real ghost aficionado in my family was my aunt Mary Ann (with whom I later co-authored The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society). Strange creakings were just the tip of the iceberg for her. My earliest childhood memories of Mary Ann include her seated at a table with a cup of coffee on one side and an ashtray on the other, regaling my cousins and me with eerie tales of murderers identified by the ghosts of their victims and tvs that spontaneously flickered on with messages from the dead. There were heiress ghosts and cat ghosts and soldier ghosts charging through forests.
But all of this was mere frivolity in comparison to The House. When I was about eight, Mary Ann and her family moved into the only indubitably haunted house I’ve ever been in. It stood high and lonely at the top of a hill, up a long and frightening driveway. There was only one neighbor (who later tried to found a kingdom and murdered one or two people) and the house itself was surrounded by dark trees. It couldn’t have been more haunted-looking, and it couldn’t have been more haunted. I only saw a pair of disembodied shoes climbing up the stairs before me one day as I snuck up to a dusty closet to get a gander at Mary Ann’s wedding dress, which I wasn’t supposed to play with, so I could never admit to it, but I heard plenty of doleful whistling that my cousin and I tried to tell ourselves was coming from the mailman, plus assorted unlikely sounds emanating from empty rooms. And Mary Ann—specter detector that she was—repeatedly saw the ghost in all his glory, stretched out on the living room rug in a suit. If his intent was to disturb, he was a successful ghost. I was disturbed, and so were my cousins, and the cat, and several sensitive guests who walked into the house and ran out of it again, never to return. Typically, my aunt held seances to demand of this ghost what he wanted, which usually ended with the electricity suddenly cutting out, plunging the entire neighborhood into darkness. It was an unnerving house. I’m something of a loner by nature, but if I happened to find myself alone in that house, I bolted outdoors at once. Sitting in the middle of the driveway seemed safer than sitting in the house.
You would think that this experience would make me ghost-averse, but you would be wrong. I like ghosts! Here’s why: I feel quite certain that all ghosts are struggling under the burden of an unfulfilled duty—why would they loiter about, otherwise? They must want something desperately. Once they attain their desire, they will surely subside gratefully away, pleased to have effected what they could not complete in mortal life. But they are constantly thwarted in achieving their goals, for in my cosmology, ghosts have no ability to move or touch things in the mortal realm, so they’re limited to strategic appearances and talking. Endlessly, they try to communicate. Endlessly, their audience runs away in horror. All they want is to deliver their message, and they face dire limitations on their ability to do so.
Now what does that sound like? To me, it sounds a lot like being a writer! The parallels are unmistakable: Both of us are trying to communicate; both of us are forced to rely on proxy-selves to present our urgent messages; and mostly, nobody wants to hear anything we’re trying to say. Poor ghosts. Poor writers (sometimes).
Because I sympathize with the ghostly plight, I have a problem with most ghost stories. In your garden-variety ghost story, the protagonist is generally the haunted, not the haunt, and the stories themselves are generally about how unhappy the protagonist is to find that he or she is haunted. The narrative arc usually involves some form of ghost-riddance, whether by removal of protagonist or ghost. The happy ending is that the protagonist is free of the ghost.
Bah!
I’m much more interested in how the ghost feels. Accordingly, my newest book is Ghost Guild: The Lost Three, featuring three dead siblings on a search for their immortal destiny, which turns out to be inextricably linked to that of a plucky orphan (I love plucky orphans!). My ghosts, deposited back on earth with no instruction in their new state, attain through a variety of adventures the spectral skills necessary to take charge of their afterlives, which proves very lucky indeed for the orphan Aggie and very unlucky for a certain villainous medium named Serena Aster. I hope you’ll enjoy my ghostly heroes and their non-garden-variety ghost story.
A wickedly entertaining supernatural story about three siblings finding their way in the world as ghosts from the bestselling author of the Ivy and Bean series, Annie Barrows.
Everyone at the Ghost Guild knows how the afterlife is supposed to work. But something is amiss with the case of three siblings—Genie, Fenella, and Tillotson Maconochie—who are beginning their journey as ghosts in a highly irregular way. They haven’t even been issued their copy of the Ghostology, which would have helped them know how to stay out of trouble. It’s no wonder that they fall prey to the infamous swindler Serena Aster, and end up trapped in her mansion to do her evil bidding for eternity. When they discover that a young orphan is trapped with them, their desire to break free and find their greater ghostly purpose takes on new urgency.
In this page-turning, beautifully illustrated yarn, perfect for fans of A Series of Unfortunate Eventsand The Millicent Quibb School of Etiquette for Young Ladies of Mad Science readers will discover that at the end of their lives, the Maconochie siblings’ remarkable story is only just beginning.