The Ghost Variations: One Hundred Stories

by Kevin Brockmeier Narrated by Vikas Adam

Overview

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 one hundred 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.

Editorial Reviews

APRIL 2021 - AudioFile

Kevin Brockmeier’s 100 short-short ghost stories are clever and imaginative, so a narrator of sufficient skill and sensitivity would have made this an intriguing audiobook. Vikas Adam has a pleasing enough voice, and in straightforward narration he is listenable—often engaging. But he lacks range and virtuosity. Given a dramatic passage, he resorts too often to melodrama. His character voices are mostly caricatures. The result is a performance that calls attention to the narrator rather than the narrative. Consequently, the stories tend to blend into each other rather than, as intended, progress as a sequence of separate but complementary concepts, images, and moods. D.A.W. © AudioFile 2021, Portland, Maine

Publishers Weekly

08/03/2020

Brockmeier (The Illumination) imagines the vicissitudes of the afterlife and the phenomena that haunt the living in this sonorous collection of 100 brief stories. In “The Office of Hereafters and Dissolutions,” a ghost is hounded by a series of celestial clerical errors. First, he is repeatedly billed an already-paid $25 fee to earn the right to haunt Earth. Then, his birth certificate is postdated by a millennium, and “the genial middle-aged man ceased not only to be but ever yet to have been.” In “Every House Key, Every Fire Hydrant, Every Electrical Outlet,” a toddler sees the faces of the dead in wall sockets. In “Dusk and Other Stories,” a poltergeist communicates with a retired publisher by disturbing books on a shelf with such titles as The Household Spirit. Not every story contains a ghost. The children in “The Sandbox Initiative” are haunted by “the tang of salt air and the blood sound of waves” on oceans they’ve yet to see. In “The Census,” a highlight, Brockmeier imagines God’s alarm at the disproportionate number of ghosts in the world compared to living people, and makes some adjustments, including turning himself into a spirit (“The majority of theologians regard this as His most impressive feat to date,” the narrator wryly concludes). Brockmeier’s luminous sentences and potent metaphors animate the phantasmagorical material. These eloquent dispatches show the writer’s remarkable range. (Oct.)

From the Publisher

By turns scary, funny, touching, troubling and sad.”
—USA Today

“Those who enjoyed Brockmeier’s The Brief History of the Dead . . . will no doubt rejoice to read more poignant stories. . . . Ranges from funny to scary, checking all the boxes for those who love ghost stories in various forms and styles.”
—BookRiot

“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

“Sonorous. . . . Brockmeier’s luminous sentences and potent metaphors animate the phantasmagorical material. These eloquent dispatches show the writer’s remarkable range.” 
—Publishers Weekly

“A teeming throng of stories in miniature in my favorite mode by one of my favorite writers. Brockmeier's ghosts range from the wistful to the terrifying—I could only wish that there were one hundred more.” 
—Kelly Link, author of  Get in Trouble

“The Ghost Variations is pure Kevin Brockmeier—lush and playful and devastating and brilliant; a haunted hotel with a hundred rooms and a hundred doors, behind which lie a hundred perfect and terrifying dioramas. It's been ages since I've been this profoundly sated by a story collection, and I loved every minute of it.”
—Carmen Maria Machado, author of Her Body and Other Parties

“The Ghost Variations is a haunted jukebox sparkling in the shadows, built to house a hundred voices, a hundred gorgeous songs. Each one is a masterpiece in miniature from one of our greatest writers, by turns funny and philosophical, chilling and warm. Like a palmful of smelling salts, these very short stories will wake you up. Only Kevin Brockmeier could write ghost stories that make a reader feel so alive.”
—Karen Russell, author of Orange World and Other Stories
 
“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

APRIL 2021 - AudioFile

Kevin Brockmeier’s 100 short-short ghost stories are clever and imaginative, so a narrator of sufficient skill and sensitivity would have made this an intriguing audiobook. Vikas Adam has a pleasing enough voice, and in straightforward narration he is listenable—often engaging. But he lacks range and virtuosity. Given a dramatic passage, he resorts too often to melodrama. His character voices are mostly caricatures. The result is a performance that calls attention to the narrator rather than the narrative. Consequently, the stories tend to blend into each other rather than, as intended, progress as a sequence of separate but complementary concepts, images, and moods. D.A.W. © AudioFile 2021, Portland, Maine

Kirkus Reviews

2020-07-29
Brockmeier's latest is a collection of 100 tiny tales, each precisely two pages long.

But these ghost stories do their haunting in a wide variety of tones and moods and modes. These miniatures aren't always long on narrative. Many are thought experiments, meditations, fables, allegories, head-of-a-pin paintings. What unites them is first and foremost Brockmeier's questing sensibility, a fascination with abstract ideas that find form in fiction the way spirit is said to find form in phantasm. The book's central idea, it seems, is that death is a permeable membrane—indeed, it's here crossed casually and constantly, from every side and in every conceivable way. The dead aren't dead, nor is alivethe other half of a simple binary. Instead, 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." Uncanny and unsettling but also consistently amusing, the book shares a title with Robert Schumann's tortured final work but not that work's tone. Pachyderms overhear a scientist's recording of a dead friend and—fooled by this aural ghost—search the savanna for her ("Elephants"); a commercial logger with a mania for clear-cutting finds that it extends into the afterlife ("A Blight on the Landscape"); a woman communicates with her dead lover by way of their mingled aromas ("Bouquet"). One minor disappointment: It seems that, perhaps to make this feel more like a novel and less like an anthology, Brockmeier has created an elaborate organizational schema. Not only is the book divided into 11 thematic sections ("Ghosts and Time," "Ghosts and Love and Friendship," and so on), but there's also a 20-plus-page "Partial Concordance of Themes." Ultimately this apparatus seems labored, clunky—but that minor flaw doesn't detract much.

Varied, inventive, uncanny, and playful: a gifted fabulist's cabinet of curiosities, his book-length memento mori.

Product Details

BN ID:	2940177234458
Publisher:	Penguin Random House
Publication date:	03/09/2021
Edition description:	Unabridged

Read an Excerpt

SEVENTY

A MAN IN THE MIRROR
 
That woman in the owl-eye glasses leads a life of secrecy and ritual. In the morning before she leaves for work, and in the evening before she goes to sleep, she always spends two hours staring into the mirror by her front door: four hours total, each and every day, without fail. For years this has been her habit, though not, as you might suspect, because she loves her own reflection. Her nose roosts too low on her face, for one thing. Her chin is too broad and bony. And her freckles, once her best feature, have gone gray along with her hair. No, when she addresses the mirror, she does so at an angle, gazing not at herself but past herself. Some years ago, on her way out the door, she was adjusting the pendant on her necklace when a sudden glassiness of motion caught her eye. At first she mistook it for a flaw in the mirror’s silver. Then the flaw startled her by roping its arms over its head and opening its mouth in a helpless yawn, so recognizably human and yet so obviously immaterial that she knew at once that it—that he—was a ghost.
 
Every day since then, as if by appointment, she has watched the ghost’s comings and goings. Only in the small Venetian mirror by the front door does she see him, and even then only occasionally, when his activities happen to intersect with the living room, the hallway, or the outermost edge of her kitchen. Now and then he behaves with what seems to be affection toward what seem to be people, knitting his fingers around as if tying a ribbon in someone’s hair, for instance, or rocking back and forth as if embracing someone from behind. From this she has judged that he has a wife and daughter, though they have never, as he has, taken shape in the silver. Once, nearly a decade ago, upon a rainy April eight a.m., he approached the mirror to inspect his teeth. He was channeling a fingernail between his incisors when he accidentally met her eyes. For a few seconds, as his face did something curious, her knees locked and her toes began to tingle. Her heart seemed to beat at the same lazy pace as the world. She realized she was in love. Ever since then, she has been waiting for it to happen again.
 
On the first Saturday of each month, the woman in the owl-eye glasses puts on her best silk blouse and her pressed denim skirt and heads out for lunch with her friend the manicurist, who works in a little shop across the street. Last week, over burgers and fries, she almost told her about the ghost. Instead, though, she confessed a different secret altogether: how she fantasizes, and often, about erasing the past fifty years of her life and starting over again, awakening as she used to be, a skinny girl with red hair and freckles, whose decisions had not yet been made, whose rituals had not yet been established, and who could never imagine that fifty years later, in her loneliness and disappointment, she would long to trade her life away. “Are you,” her friend asked in a voice of almost unbearable sympathy, “seeing someone?”

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