The Ghost Writer

by Loreth Anne White

Claudia has been variously described as Daphne du Maurier meets Shirley Jackson, a female Edgar Allan Poe melded with Stephen King.

“She’s the real deal—a murderess turned authoress who killed two teens and brutally stabbed to death a seven-year-old boy when she was only seventeen. Talk about hashtag-own-voices, this is it. A Gothic horror novelist who writes murder with authority. Because she is one.”

Grief is a dark mistress. She makes me second-guess, blindsides me at the most unexpected moments, slices my heart open and renders me vulnerable to all the emotions that roil over the loss of a loved one: hurt, anger, remorse, guilt, fear, loneliness.

I feel as though he’s some kind of shapeshifting threshold guardian, ferrying me across this channel from the mainland to an unearthly, dark realm on the other side, hidden by mist in the sea.

She sentenced herself to a lifelong incarceration on that island. She’s guilty as hell.

“I don’t want platitudes from you, Grace. I want honesty. Brutal truth. My frailty is the reason I need a ghostwriter now—it’s become a necessary evil.”

“Their stories were larger than life, violent, dystopian.” She sets her glass down. “Often about girls controlled by the whims of fathers, kings, wicked witches. And their rebellious subtext slid right past court censors. In many of their renditions, groups of fairies—intelligent, independent women—stepped in to put things right.” She smiles. “Your early domestic thrillers, if you will. Women getting their just rewards, sometimes in over-the-top ways.”

In the art of battle, the first move is to throw your opponent off balance, both physically and mentally.

“That’s the thing about a terrible secret, Grace. You think you’re keeping it, but really, it’s the secret that keeps you.”

“Andrew Logan—that’s your husband, right? He was killed with his mistress on board your boat when it blew up.” She pauses, sips. “That must cut.”

“Nothing in nature is intrinsically evil. Nature just is, and does what it does for survival. Good, bad, evil—those are human value judgments we bestow on things, depending on our cultures, traditions, history. And we use this to keep our communities, tribes, societies in check and functioning as a whole because, really, we are just herd animals.”

“People justify what they do in this way all the time. By changing their inner narrative of things. The bigger worry becomes whether they’ll get caught, not that what they’re doing is bad.”