Women and Ghosts

The author of The War Between the Tates and the Pulitzer prize-winning Foreign Affairs now brings her irresistible wit to the ghost story. In nine spooky tales, Alison Lurie writes of women haunted by ghosts both literal and metaphorical: A woman about to marry Mr. Right is visited by the spirit of his first wife; a dead fiancé haunts a foreign service officer every time she has an intimate moment with another man; the ghost of a girl in a Halloween costume disconcerts the perfect housewife. A secretary on a diet begins to see obese people everywhere she looks; a self-conscious poet is shadowed by her intrusive doppelganger; and a capricious, malevolent spirit seems to have inhabited an acquisitive matron’s prized piece of furniture. Delightfully strange and beautifully told, these nine tales show Alison Lurie at her luminous best.

From Publishers Weekly

From Pulitzer-winning novelist Lurie (Foreign Affairs) comes this first-and disappointing-short-story collection with a supernatural slant. Humorously spooky at best, and breaking no new ground, the nine stories here feature women who are disturbed during their daily routines by the appearance of Disney-like entities from another realm. A dead boyfriend returns to prevent his ex from dating other men; a wicked highboy doesn't want its drawers opened; a Wordsworth scholar turns into a sheep; a woman on a diet is plagued by obese ghosts who lure her into bakeries. Lurie's storytelling remains smooth throughout; what's missing is any sense of risk-taking or envelope-pushing. The endings are consistently dull and often gimmicky, and many of the stories are formulaic. An exception to the routine entries is "The Pool People," whose premise about a rich woman's swimming pool haunted by workmen has a strong social tension ticking away behind it. Overall, though, this is wraithlike entertainment from an author who usually delivers far more substantive work. Paperback rights to Avon; author tour. Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal

The nine short stories in this collection display Lurie's fascination with the supernatural. Known for her incisive look at the battle between the sexes (The War Between the Tates, LJ 8/74), the author moves to the edges of reality where malevolent spirits harass the living, punishing them for previous misdeeds. The stories range from the humorous, like "Fat People," in which an overweight woman is haunted by visions of incredibly obese people when she tries to diet; to the tragic, like "The Pool People," in which the spirits of two dead workers wreak their revenge on the socialite whose callousness and cruelty caused their deaths. In between, Lurie explores the gray areas of reality, showing, for instance, that the ghosts haunting a woman may not be authentic spirits but an illusion created by her fragile psyche. While this lightweight collection is not vintage Lurie, it should appeal to lovers of the supernatural and will undoubtedly be popular around Halloween.Andrea Caron Kempf, Johnson Cty. Community Coll. Lib., Overland Park, Kan.Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist

Lurie's literary vita includes acclaimed novels, children's books, and two recent nonfiction studies. Now add to this impressive repertoire an edgy and eerie collection of nine stories, the very essence of which is revealed in its succinct title. In each tale Lurie pits a female protagonist against an apparition of varied, often comical, spectral persuasions. For poet Karo McKay, a doppelganger is roaming the country, signing autographs and even having love affairs. Other ghostly visitors appear, and also what appear more likely to be figments of very vivid imaginations. In any case, Lurie will satisfy the expectations of her many admirers. These entertaining and enchanting tales deliver far more than one might bargain for, with afterimages that reverberate long after the initial delight with Lurie's dexterous prose has worn off. Alice Joyce

From Kirkus Reviews

With her usual dry wit, Lurie (The Truth About Lorin Jones, 1988, etc.) makes the supernatural seem at first possible, and then inevitable, as this collection's gimmick loses its freshness. These are all satisfying tales individually, but none stand out from the crowd, and they suffer from collective overkill as the unearthly phenomena begin to seem like an easy way out of all narrative entanglements rather than an integral part of the plots. For example, the narrator of ``Ilse's House'' was about to marry a successful academic when she began having visions of a woman's legs sticking out from the space next to the refrigerator, a spot where her fianc‚ once found his first wife sitting in the dark after he stayed late at a party. The excuse of the ghost rescues the narrator from clarifying exactly why she ended the relationship. Lurie has a knack for letting the punishment fit the crime, but often the ghosts seem unimaginative. ``The Pool People'' start appearing in the pool of a rather unpleasant woman who has not allowed the men working on her house to cool off there, especially because she feared that one might have AIDS. While the ghosts' initial appearance is poetic justice, they fail to do much. Finally, a dose of detachment hampers the shivers. ``In the Shadow'' follows Celia, an employee at the American embassy in London, whose rejected suitor dies in a car accident. Even a transfer to a remote country does not stop her from seeing the dead man whenever she gets close to a lover and hearing his rude comments on her partners. But the story's effect is diminished because she was never in love with the suitor in the first place. Crisp prose throughout, but the spook show gets in the way of character development. (Author tour) -- Copyright ©1994, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

From the Publisher

With tales exquisitely strange and perfectly told, the best-selling author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning Foreign Affairs delights us yet again with nine tales of women and of the unexpected.

About the Author

Alison Lurie is a professor at Cornell University.

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