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If only I had looked at his picture, I would have realized this was a real GHOST STORY! John Harwood's photo has that eerie quality given to the ghost genre. John Harwood is the author of
"The Ghost Story". A book like no other.

Gerard Freeman grows up in a small town in Australia. He and his parents live an almost silent life. No television, radio only in rare instances, books, yes. Father and mother have separate bedrooms, are very polite to each other but nothing of love, passion is shown. Phyllis Freeman protects her son, Gerard from everything it seems. He must be home right after school, she worries incessantly about him. The only reprieve in this desolate life are the stories told by Phyllis of her life in the English countryside, Staplefield and of her grandmother, Viola. But these stories stop once Gerard has the audacity to look in his mother's locked cupboard and finds a photograph. His mother finds him with this photo and beats him. Gerard implores his mother to continue telling stories of England but she refuses.

Gerard has a lonely life at school and only the sudden appearance of a letter addressed to him brightens his life. He is introduced to Anne, a lonely disabled young woman from England who is looking for a pen pal. They write letters to each other for years and fall in love; Anne will not allow Gerard to see her, ever, until she can walk again. Writing to Anne is against Gerard's mother's wishes, but he continues he must- he cannot stop.

At a time after his father's death Gerard has saved enough money to visit England, again against his mother's wishes. He wants to see Anne but alas he cannot find her and returns home from London broken man. He continues he college life, working in the library.

And, then his mother dies and while cleaning to sell the house he finds a journal that his hidden and reveals a story that intrigues him, It must be about Staplefiield and his mother and her family. He places an ad in the London Times and asks for any information about Phyllis Freeman and her sister, Anne. He is rewarded. Mrs. Hamish responds with a story of the family and Gerard once more is off to England.

This is a novel of many stories; the maze of one family running into another is frustrating. The tales are well told, however, enough to keep your interest. What is really happening? Who are all of these people? How did this come to be? We must ask the author, John Harwood. An eerily spellbinding book that I picked up because of a recommendation. Well worth the read! The ending is better than a Hitchcock, oh, yes, the ending is so much better...

Fans of Victorian and Edwardian ghost stories will probably enjoy this most, with its interweaving of carefully crafted homage pieces and a contemporary literary-mystery plot. There's a lot to be said for this kind of novel: it's a wonderful opportunity to explore literary-theoretical musings while using an engaging mystery to drive the story. The problem is that A. S. Byatt aced this particular sub-genre, probably for all time, with her Booker-winning "Possession"(1990), and it's still so far ahead of anything else in the game that newcomers are invariably found wanting, even if they aren't courting comparison (as I'm pretty sure Harwood isn't here). I quite enjoyed "The Ghost Writer" but, for me, it wasn't quite daring enough. The author clearly knows his sources, but he doesn't do anything dazzling with them. He throws in a few references to Henry James but then feels the need to explain them, presumably for the benefit of the less widely read. Moreover, he refuses to explore much of the theoretical territory his metafictional narrative must necessarily cross: the crisis of the subject; the relationship between reader, writer and text; the faith we put in written records, even fictional ones. Nor did I find the novel sufficiently plot-driven to sustain interest merely as a thriller. Tension builds, but the short stories which end up being central sometimes feel, in the reading, irritatingly tangential. You get the sense that it took a very long time to "build" this book; that it was made like a carefully crafted object, held up and considered from different angles, refined, worried over, and extensively revised. I say that because it's more pleasing in retrospect when you can see it in its totality, when the mystery is solved and you see the seemingly complex plot in its devilish simplicity. But as a story which unfolds in time, as stories must, it isn't quite so compelling. You get the impression that information is being wilfully withheld - it is of course, as it must be in every story of suspense, but the trick is to disguise the process. Here, I just felt I was being toyed with. Ultimately, though, these are fairly minor quibbles. The novel works. It really comes to life eighty pages from the end, and that ending, when it comes, is powerful, vivid and magnificently dark. When you put the book down and look back on what you've read, the plot and the passions which drive the characters are really quite macabre and extraordinary. The effect is that "The Ghost Writer" is a novel you might enjoy looking back on more than reading. It'll certainly have you looking forward: this is a first novel, and the dark intelligence behind it bodes well for Harwood's future work.

It was hard to decide on a star rating for this book. I read almost all of it in one day, engrossed by, enchanted with, and envious of Harwood's talent. *This*, I marveled, is his debut novel? And so I eschewed all the day's tasks in favor of sitting on the deck and reading, reading, reading. And then, with about eight pages left to go, it all went south. When I read the last sentence, I actually turned the page, hoping for something more, not because I was sorry to see the story end (I'm often sad to say goodbye to characters), but because I thought there must be, on those blank end pages, the "real" ending. But no, there was nothing. And I stood up, set the book down and said, "What the hell just happened?!" So much of it is so good that I want to give it five stars, but the ending seemed so tacked-on -- or maybe just silly -- that I was tempted to knock my rating down to three. Instead, I split the difference. But now I'm torn, torn between telling people to read it so they can explain to me what I might have missed or telling them not to read it, because the ending is so unsatisfying. I feel a bit gypped.