The Ghost Variations

One Hundred Stories

By: Kevin Brockmeier

Narrated by: Vikas Adam

Ghost stories tap into our most primal emotions as they encourage us to confront the timeless question: What comes after death? Here, in tales that are by turn scary, funny, philosophic, and touching, you’ll find that question sharpened, split, reconsidered - and met with a multitude of answers.

A spirit who is fated to spend eternity reliving the exact moment she lost her chance at love, ghostly trees that haunt the occupant of a wooden house, specters that snatch anyone who steps into the shadows, and parakeets that serve as mouthpieces for the dead: These are just a few of the characters in this extraordinary compendium of 100 ghost stories. Kevin Brockmeier’s fiction has always explored the space between the fantastical and the everyday with profundity and poignancy. As in his previous books, The Ghost Variations discovers new ways of looking at who we are and what matters to us, exploring how mysterious, sad, strange, and comical it is to be alive - or, as it happens, not to be.

©2020 Kevin Brockmeier (P)2020 Random House Audio

Critic reviews

“Brockmeier's 100 extremely short ghost stories present a range in tone from unsettling to terrifying, and pack a fearful punch with an economy of language, even for readers primed to feel uneasy. . . . The tales themselves are gems: modern, haunted treasures to be discovered.” (Booklist)

“Brockmeier's world has a perpetual hum of oddity, a numinous glow. He's a master of defamiliarizing the everyday, of what the Russians call 'making strange'... Varied, inventive, uncanny, and playful: a gifted fabulist's cabinet of curiosities, his book-length memento mori.” (Kirkus Reviews)

“In Kevin Brockmeier’s The Ghost Variations, the familiar poetry of life gives way to uncanny wonder and startling discoveries, leaving the reader constantly unsettled, as if we found a room in a house where none had been before or woke in the night to a figure standing at the bottom of the bed. There might be a hundred stories in this collection, but there are a million reasons to love Brockmeier, one of literature’s greatest living talents, who writes sentences like spells and who elegantly phases between the walls of literary and genre fiction.” (Benjamin Percy, author of Red Moon)

It’s all right.

Most of the stories are interesting and it keeps you questioning about life and death. It also keeps you seeing life and death in different angles that you probably didn’t think of. It’s a good casual book.