A Manhattan Ghost Story - Softcover

Wright, T. M.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0812519507 ISBN 13: 9780812519501

Publisher: Tor Books, 1994

Synopsis

An unsuspecting phtographer visiting Manhattan, Abner Cray encounters a wide variety of people who have just two things in common--they are all dead, and they want him to join them. Reissue.

About this title

Review:

In the late 1970s and early 1980s, T. M. Wright earned praise from critics for a series of ghost novels about isolated houses in upstate New York. A Manhattan Ghost Story, first published in 1984, moved the action to New York City. And the tale is not about a single building, but about an all-pervasive layer of reality in which the shades of the living mark their days in a listless state, until finally they fall apart. A commercial photographer gets slowly pulled, while still living, over to the "other side"--a plight that leads to a profoundly unsettling and surreal chain of events. "And if you get stuck in that other city, that other Manhattan, you find yourself getting awfully desperate and mean-spirited, the way some people are affected by too much heat or the crying of small children."

Wright's ghosts are evocatively described, with their awkward movements and stares of "quiet, studied indifference." But be forewarned that A Manhattan Ghost Story, while justly celebrated, has a couple of minor flaws: a weak love story and slipshod editing that didn't catch place names that change partway through.

About the Author:

T M Wright says, 'Without the dead, where would we writers be?' To large extent, that's been the guiding theme of his literary output for the past nearly 30 years - beginning with his first novel, Strange Seed (Everest House, 1978), on half a dozen 'Best of the Genre' lists, and culminating in his recently-released novella, I am the Bird, for PS Publishing (UK), and, earlier this year, his novella, A Spider on my Tongue, for NYX Books.

About this edition

• Publisher: Tor Books
• Publication date: 1994
• ISBN 10: 0812519507
• ISBN 13: 9780812519501
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 384