When John is cast out of the House where he comfortably lives his (after)life, all he wants is to get back. He’s uninterested in how he ended up in California, in who the Grey Man was who attacked him, and in what his presence means about what happens after we die. All he knows is that he was comfortable in the House, and he’d like to go back. Unfortunately, it’s not that easy. He’ll need the help of an earnest psychic, a publicist known for working miracles, and an opportunistic, desperate actress, Persephone, if he’s to ever figure out who he was on earth and how he can get back to his home.
On one hand, Amerie’s This Is Not a Ghost Story does, actually, seem to be a ghost story, utilizing some of the genre’s more predictable questions and twists, as well as fun if sometimes clunky world-building around what John can and can’t do. John is a rather grumpy protagonist, uninterested in all the things that he nonetheless agrees to in the hopes that someone who knows him will see him or hear about him and get in touch.
And that’s really the key to why this is not a ghost story: John’s ghostliness is actually much less interesting than everything happening around it—namely, his emerging fame.
People are fascinated by John’s translucent body. They want to know who he would have voted for, if he hadn’t been dead, and they want to know what he remembers. Some people are torn about him being Black. Some people start cults around him, while others rail against him in their sermons. A rapper tries to get him to feature on an upcoming single. He’s asked back to the same late-night show several times over.
The fact that John is uninterested and sometimes even uninteresting simply doesn’t matter. He is a conversation topic, a social media debate, a blank slate on which people all over the world paint their own issues and questions. A Black man, yet also somehow not one, not alive, yet not fully dead, John is caught between worlds and people everywhere he goes.
Amerie’s novel is also caught: between a more traditional, character-based ghost story that alternates John’s and Persephone’s points of view, and a more poetic, surreal story that lurks at the edges of the plot, the world of the Grey Man, the House, and an enigmatic figure who may have been alive since the beginning of time itself.
What results is a haziness between the two approaches that paints confusion. A reader enjoying the plot might grow impatient or puzzled by seeming holes in the story. For example: You’re telling me no doctors were curious about this man? And when he does succeed in eating at one point . . . where does the food go?
These questions wouldn’t matter if the more fantastical, surreal side of the story were allowed more rein. In a more poetic, strange story, some of the details can be smudged around the edges and endure the readers’ suspension of disbelief. But as the plot of This Is Not a Ghost Story progresses, it grows more straightforward rather than less, taking very human and mundane turns, which makes the fogginess merely feel like a mystery that’s been solved instead of an intriguing haze of translucence, energy, and the presence of spirits. An intriguing novel is caught somewhere between the ghost story we all know and a ghost story that challenges our expectations.
FICTION
This Is Not a Ghost Story
By Amerie
William Morrow
Published June 10, 2025
