
Pulitzer Prize-winning author Alison Lurie offers here nine spooky tales of women haunted by ghosts-both literal and metaphysical. There is no clue, or introduction, to tell us why the focus is on women, only the stories, each with a female protagonist, grappling somewhere between the natural and the supernatural, the definite and the not-quite-defined.
[[nid:4845]]Each of the stories is engaging and unique: a woman about to marry Mr. Right is visited by the spirit of his first wife; a secretary on a diet begins to see obese people everywhere she looks; a self-conscious poet is shadowed by her intrusive doppelgänger; and a capricious, malevolent spirit seems to have inhabited an acquisitive matron’s prized piece of furniture.
It’s fun to imagine the author writing this collection: a Cornell professor musing on the social intercourse of ghosts and spectral influences—not the usual fare for the halls of high academia!