A Manhattan Ghost Story

"A Manhattan Ghost Story": A photographer, Abner Cray, goes to NYC to work on a "coffee table photo book" about Manhattan and encounters, in the apartment he's renting, not only a woman, Phyllis Pellaprat, with whom he falls in love, and finds out halfway through the novel not only that she's dead but that the absent friend whose apartment he's using murdered her. Beyond that, he's been given the doubtful gift of "seeing" and interacting with hundreds of spirits that inhabit Manhattan.ABOUT THE AUTHOR:Terrance Michael Wright (AKA T. M. Wright) is best known as a writer of horror fiction, speculative fiction, and poetry. He has written over 25 novels, novellas, and short stories over the last 40 years. His first novel, 1978's Strange Seed, was nominated for a World Fantasy Award, and his 2003 novel Cold House was nominated for a Bram Stoker Award. His novels have been translated into many different languages around the world. His works have been reviewed by Kirkus Reviews, Publishers Weekly, Library Journal, Booklist, and many genre magazines.T.M. Wright's first publication was the non-fiction study of unidentified flying objects, entitled The Intelligent Man's Guide to Flying Saucers in 1968 for AS Barnes. Strange Seed had five foreign editions. This, and most of his works, are available in digital editions from Crossroad PressHis seventh novel, A Manhattan Ghost Story, has had 14 foreign editions and was optioned to be filmed in the 1980s. A screenplay was written by Ronald Bass for which he was paid two million US dollars, a record breaking amount for an adaptation of a novel to the screen. The option was taken over by Robert Lawrence Productions in 1991, and then exercised in 1993. Many actors and directors have been attached to the project over the years including Wayne Wang, Julia Roberts, and Sharon Stone (who received five million US dollars because of her pay or play contract). The film is currently in development at Touchstone Pictures.T. M. Wright has written over 40 short stories that have appeared in several magazines including Twilight Zone Magazine, PostScripts, Cemetery Dance, Flesh and Blood Magazine, UpState, and Brutarian.

Amazon.com 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.

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