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peterongcook 's review for:
The Ghost Notebooks
by Ben Dolnick
This book was a quick read, so it gets an extra star for that. It could have dwelled on boring mood and setting, which may have made the book better now that I think of it, but the story moves at a comfortably quick pace. It’s also a short book.
I read the story as an allegory for millennial existentialism, and not primarily as a haunted house / ghost story. It’s about the fears of adulthood and aging. The most disturbing part of the story is that a ghost can fast forward your life, showing you the mundanity and uncomfortableness and loneliness of being old and infirm far into your future. That’s all existentialist anxiety right there.
The book is about dealing with things like that. Growing up, having job insecurity, having relationship problems, getting married, dealing with aging parents who still treat your adult self as a kid, dealing with the death of loved ones and grief, guilt, and getting older and then old and then dead.
I read the story as an allegory for millennial existentialism, and not primarily as a haunted house / ghost story. It’s about the fears of adulthood and aging. The most disturbing part of the story is that a ghost can fast forward your life, showing you the mundanity and uncomfortableness and loneliness of being old and infirm far into your future. That’s all existentialist anxiety right there.
The book is about dealing with things like that. Growing up, having job insecurity, having relationship problems, getting married, dealing with aging parents who still treat your adult self as a kid, dealing with the death of loved ones and grief, guilt, and getting older and then old and then dead.