Gail Godwin has penned a new type of ghost story

Grief Cottage. By Gail Godwin. Bloomsbury; 324 pages; $26. To be published in Britain in August, £18.99.

OUT with the clichés of cold draughts and creaking doors. Contemporary novelists are refocusing the ghost story, revelling in its potential for psychological drama. “Grief Cottage” by Gail Godwin, a prolific American writer, is a quiet, hopeful ghost story—a wistful reflection on loss, loneliness, coming of age and coming to terms with the past.

Marcus, the narrator, is 11 years old when his mother is killed in a car accident. He is sent to live on a small island in South Carolina with his great aunt, a reclusive painter. A precocious, imaginative boy, he worries constantly about how his words and actions affect others.

Desperate not to burden his new guardian, he spends much of his time outdoors, finding himself drawn to a derelict house known as Grief Cottage because of a hurricane half a century earlier during which a teenage boy and his parents went missing. They are presumed to have been swept out to sea. One day Marcus sees a boy with a “flat unsmiling mouth” and “hungry dark pools” for eyes. He is both repelled and attracted by this apparition. Struggling to deal with his losses, Marcus believes the boy “had been waiting all this time…for someone to wonder where he was—to miss him after he was gone”.

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