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    Ghosting
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    Ghosting
    Unavailable
    Ghosting
    Ebook372 pages6 hours

    Ghosting

    By Kirby Gann

    3.5/5

    ()

    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this ebook

    "A novelist of daring creativity and passion."Edmund White

    A dying drug kingpin enslaved to the memory of his dead wife; a young woman torn between a promising future and the hardscrabble world she grew up in; a mother willing to do anything to fuel her addiction to pills; and her youngest son, searching for the truth behind his older brother's disappearance, are just some of the unforgettable characters that populate Ghosting, Kirby Gann's lush and lyrical novel of family and community, and the ties that can both bond and betray.

    Fleece Skaggs has disappeared, along with drug dealer Lawrence Gruel's reefer harvest. Deciding that the best way to discover what happened to his older brother is to take his place as a drug runner for Gruel, James Cole plunges into a dark underworld of drugs, violence, and long hidden family secrets, where discovering what happened to his brother could cost him his life.

    A genre-subverting literary mystery told from the alternating viewpoint of different characters, Ghosting is both a simple quest for the truthwhat exactly happened to Fleece Skaggs?and a complex consideration of human frailty.

    Kirby Gann is the author of the novels The Barbarian Parade and Our Napoleon in Rags (Ig Publishing, 2005). His short fiction has appeared in Witness and The Best of Witness, The Crescent Review, American Writing, The Louisville Review, Southeast Review, and The Southern Indiana Review, among other journals. Gann is managing editor at Sarabande Books and teaches in the brief-residency MFA in writing program at Spalding University.


    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherIg Publishing
    Release dateApr 17, 2012
    ISBN9781935439509
    Unavailable
    Ghosting
    Author

    Kirby Gann

    Kirby Gann is the author of the novel Ghosting, which was included in the Best of Year lists from Publishers Weekly, Shelf Awareness, and flavorpill.com, and was a finalist for the Kentucky Book of the Year; an earlier novel, Our Napoleon in Rags, was also a finalist for the Kentucky Book of the Year. He is the series editor of Bookmarked on behalf of Ig Publishing, and contributed the first title in that series: Bookmarked: John Knowles’ A Separate Peace. He is a freelance editor and writing mentor and is on the faculty in the low-residency MFA in Writing Program at Spalding University. Gann and his wife Stephanie, a horticulturist, live with an ever-changing pack of dogs outside of Louisville, Kentucky. The Barbarian Parade was his first novel, originally published in 2004.

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    Reviews for Ghosting

    3.5/5

    2 ratings2 reviews

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    • 2/5
      I Got to page 125 and had to quit, and to get this far took multiple days. This is one very boring book and by this point in an almost 300 page book, something has to make the reader want to proceed. The characters up to this point are one dimensional and behave as stereotypical as possible.The author can write, he checks off as many of the MFA requirements that books these days feel the need to include, copying the styles of Cormac McCarthy and the descriptions by James Lee Burke, but mimicking these writers isn't the same as telling a story that these authors would tell. In this case the story is just not interesting, and I bet I can figure out the ending.
    • 5/5
      I read an except of this and decided to read it because the language in his description of the characters is quite good. The main character is James Cole Prather. It says right off in chapter 1 "He is twenty three years old. He has no reason to imagine within a year he might be dead." So that is the expectation that hangs over it. But as the book goes along it is less clear whether what is laid out will be followed. And, I am not going to give anything away here. There is a point later on in the book that I wanted to quote, but I can't find it. It talks about mysteries as who done its, saying that they describe a murder, and then all the steps to solving the murder, but what is really important are the steps, the people and the events leading up to it. So, then I am expecting that this is that new kind of mystery. It does seem to be this, but the mystery doesn't necessarily apply to James Cold, because his brother, Fleece, has gone missing, perhaps with a load of drugs - for he works for a drug peddler - or perhaps murdered for attempting it. Also, his father was murdered years ago, though that may be a mystery only to James, and to the reader for awhile. The other main character is Shady Beck, who was first his brother's girlfriend, and who would become his if James had his way, but for now, they hang out, and she cares for him, but isn't sure how. The other important characters are his mother, Lyda, a long time addict; the drug pusher, Mister Gruel, who manages yet to have some fatherly feelings towards not only his own son, who goes by the name of Spunk, but also perhaps for the two brothers, James and Fleece; and his partner, Noe, who appears to have no humanity at all; and a preacher, ex-addict. The final character is the place, the Lake, an ingrown place that sucks one into its rules, "the kind of place people often disappeared from," where James grew up, but Shady, a few miles and a culture away, did not. What puzzled me, reading the book, was that, though the characters were so well drawn, for the longest time I didn't begin to care about them. I think this had to do with the uncertainty about whether and how they cared for one another. This changed Io that, at the end, I cared very much about what happened to James and Shady. It is a slow build that follows their relationship. By they way much else happens that affects their simply being together. But they are also part of that outside, so they bring on their own fate as they try to understand it.