The Ghost Notebooks

December 18, 2017
Dolnick’s immersive novel, about how little people know about their loved ones, adds a supernatural element to that topic. Newly engaged, Nick Beron and Hannah Rampe leave Queens for the remote upstate village of Hibernia. Hannah embraces her role as the live-in director of the Edmund Wright Historic House, which celebrates an obscure 19th-century philosopher, and Nick refocuses on his music career. Then they learn that the house has been the site of several mysteries since the gruesome death of Wright’s young son deepened Wright’s obsession with the unseen. As Hannah withdraws, battles insomnia, and begins to hear voices at night, Nick struggles to support her. Then he awakens to find her gone. When the search for her fails to yield clear answers, his effort to discover what haunted her leads through local stories and long-hidden documents that only entangle him in Hannah’s fears, Wright’s anguish, and forces neither could control. Nick’s convincing narration, a chronicle of blind spots and good intentions, is chief among the devices Dolnick (At the Bottom of Everything) deploys to give familiar motifs a contemporary sensibility in this ghost tale, love story, mystery, and bildungsroman.

Graham Halstead is the featured narrator of this tale of ghosts, past and present, who haunt Nick Beron and Hannah Rampe, the newest caretakers of the Wright Historic House in Hibernia, New York. Halstead delivers this ghostly tale in a low tone that rises and falls with the characters' emotional stress. Little by little, the ghosts make their appearances, particularly to Hannah, who slowly loses touch with reality. In addition, Halstead captures Nick, who eventually finds himself also wrestling with reality and the ghosts that haunt him. While Halstead performs the bulk of the story, the rest of the cast read diary entries written in notebooks by past inhabitants, now ghosts, of Wright House. Insanity, loss, and sorrow are woven seamlessly into this haunting tale in which the present is a transitory thing. M.B.K. � AudioFile 2018, Portland, Maine