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Ghosting
A dying drug kingpin enslaved to the memory of his dead wife; a young woman torn between a promising future and the hardscrabble world she grew up in; a mother willing to do anything to fuel her addiction to pills; and her youngest son, searching for the truth behind his older brother's disappearance, are just some of the unforgettable characters that populate Ghosting , Kirby Gann's lush and lyrical novel of family and community, and the ties that can both bond and betray.
Fleece Skaggs has disappeared, along with drug dealer Lawrence Gruel's reefer harvest. Deciding that the best way to discover what happened to his older brother is to take his place as a drug runner for Gruel, James Cole plunges into a dark underworld of drugs, violence, and long hidden family secrets, where discovering what happened to his brother could cost him his life.
A genre-subverting literary mystery told from the alternating viewpoint of different characters, Ghosting is both a simple quest for the truth—what exactly happened to Fleece Skaggs?—and a complex consideration of human frailty.
Fleece Skaggs has disappeared, along with drug dealer Lawrence Gruel's reefer harvest. Deciding that the best way to discover what happened to his older brother is to take his place as a drug runner for Gruel, James Cole plunges into a dark underworld of drugs, violence, and long hidden family secrets, where discovering what happened to his brother could cost him his life.
A genre-subverting literary mystery told from the alternating viewpoint of different characters, Ghosting is both a simple quest for the truth—what exactly happened to Fleece Skaggs?—and a complex consideration of human frailty.
248 pages, Paperback
First published April 1, 2012
16 people are currently reading
316 people want to read
About the author
Kirby Gann
6 books33 followersKirby Gann is the author of the novels Ghosting, The Barbarian Parade, and Our Napoleon in Rags. He is also co-editor (with poet Kristin Herbert) of the anthology A Fine Excess: Contemporary Literature at Play, which was a finalist for the ForeWord Magazine Book of the Year Award (Anthologies). His work has appeared most recently in The Lumberyard and The Oxford American, among other journals. He is the recipient of an Individual Artist Fellowship and two Professional Assistance Awards from the Kentucky Arts Council, and an Honorable Mention in The Pushcart Prize Anthology. Gann is Managing Editor at Sarabande Books, and teaches in the brief-residency MFA in Writing Program at Spalding University. He lives with his wife Stephanie, a horticulturist, and three dogs.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 51 reviews
September 15, 2012
Ghosting by Kirby Gann is a brutal book.
But that’s not to say it isn’t worth reading. In fact, this book provides huge rewards for readers who can get past the brutality and harshness of the world Gann has created, a world where property is fenced in by “a parade of bones” and young men are made to cut the teeth out of dead men, a world that combines elements of the classic coming-of-age novel with lyrical writing and a cast of characters who make the ensemble on television’s Justified look like lightweights.
Ghosting takes place in a poverty-stricken, lawless community that has taken over an abandoned manmade lake in rural Kentucky. Once the location of a pricey spa retreat, Lake Holloway is now home to dozens of struggling families and a ruthless drug kingpin who employs many young locals. The novel tells the story of Cole, a nineteen-year-old “laker” whose older brother, the drug-running Fleece, disappears under suspicious circumstances. Fleece’s disappearance—and possible murder—places Cole firmly between the demands of two worlds. On the one hand, Cole feels an intense obligation to help his family, including his mother, Lyda, an overbearing and pill-addicted force who relentlessly reminds Cole “he could sure learn a lesson on how families look after their own.”
But Cole wants more out of life.
He has an intense longing to find and reconnect with his brother, who he describes as carrying “himself with that most natural and yet rarest of gifts—how to be in the world,” but he also doesn’t want to follow Fleece’s path and continue the cycle of violence plaguing his family and community. Like so many young people, he wants to get away from his home to see the larger world. Cole dreams of getting out of Lake Holloway and the “enormous glass bell” that sits over Pirtle County, making the air so still that “you can feel it press on your skin and sour in your clothes.” He dreams of “hiking the highest mountain in the state.” He dreams of being an underwater welder in far-off “Louisiana or Jersey or one of the Carolinas” and is constantly saving money and taking classes to achieve these goals.
This alternative future—a future away from the lake and Pirtle County—that Cole sees for himself is epitomized by his obsession with Shady Beck, his brother’s ex-girlfriend, a college-educated young woman from a good family. But Shady lives in a reality very different from Cole’s dysfunctional life on the lake, a life that doesn’t require her to “turn your face a certain direction and keep your mouth shut” as Cole’s mother explains about life in Lake Holloway. Cole longs for what Shady’s doctor father and “Super Mom” want for her: “Endless possibility, hardcore transformation,” which Shady believes is what it “means to be young and American.”
Focusing on Cole’s desire to achieve this kind of transformation allows Gann to elevate his story above the clichés and conventions of a simple detective or mystery story. In fact, the book—and its artfully constructed narrative voice—offers a sly critique of stories that wrap their mysteries up too neatly. Gann tells us, “In real life no story works like that. In real life a story occurs among legions; to understand the story you have to know all the people it touches too.”
Gann does understand these legions of people. The novel moves effortlessly from the point of view of one character, be it Cole, Shady, Lyda, or Fleece’s drug lord boss—an immoral, controlling, dying patriarch named “Mister Greuel,” a man so twisted that he claims what he’ll miss after he’s gone is manipulating others—to the next, providing the reader with a complex and richly textured portrait of Cole’s community. At the same time, Cole struggles to find out what happened to his missing brother and come to terms with his family’s dark and violent past, a past that his mother and Greuel have been hiding from him since he was a young child.
The story is ultimately compelling, and once the main conflict is fully introduced—What happened to Fleece? Did he take off with Greuel’s biggest haul or did Greuel have him killed?—the book is nearly impossible to put down. If I have one hesitation, it is that I wish Gann would have gotten to the meat of the story sooner. Once he lets the reader fully understand the gravity of Fleece’s disappearance—on about page forty—the story starts to pick up momentum, gaining speed as the narrative continues and finally hooking us completely about halfway through the book.
At that point, there is no turning back—for the reader or for Cole, who loses all that’s left of his innocence in a gruesome but unforgettable scene near the middle of the narrative that comes full circle near the story’s conclusion. Readers who hang with the story to that point will experience a Kentucky that gets attention in the news media and in television shows but never with the insights and grace that only a first-rate novel such as this one can provide.
Originally published in the Bowling Green Daily News
But that’s not to say it isn’t worth reading. In fact, this book provides huge rewards for readers who can get past the brutality and harshness of the world Gann has created, a world where property is fenced in by “a parade of bones” and young men are made to cut the teeth out of dead men, a world that combines elements of the classic coming-of-age novel with lyrical writing and a cast of characters who make the ensemble on television’s Justified look like lightweights.
Ghosting takes place in a poverty-stricken, lawless community that has taken over an abandoned manmade lake in rural Kentucky. Once the location of a pricey spa retreat, Lake Holloway is now home to dozens of struggling families and a ruthless drug kingpin who employs many young locals. The novel tells the story of Cole, a nineteen-year-old “laker” whose older brother, the drug-running Fleece, disappears under suspicious circumstances. Fleece’s disappearance—and possible murder—places Cole firmly between the demands of two worlds. On the one hand, Cole feels an intense obligation to help his family, including his mother, Lyda, an overbearing and pill-addicted force who relentlessly reminds Cole “he could sure learn a lesson on how families look after their own.”
But Cole wants more out of life.
He has an intense longing to find and reconnect with his brother, who he describes as carrying “himself with that most natural and yet rarest of gifts—how to be in the world,” but he also doesn’t want to follow Fleece’s path and continue the cycle of violence plaguing his family and community. Like so many young people, he wants to get away from his home to see the larger world. Cole dreams of getting out of Lake Holloway and the “enormous glass bell” that sits over Pirtle County, making the air so still that “you can feel it press on your skin and sour in your clothes.” He dreams of “hiking the highest mountain in the state.” He dreams of being an underwater welder in far-off “Louisiana or Jersey or one of the Carolinas” and is constantly saving money and taking classes to achieve these goals.
This alternative future—a future away from the lake and Pirtle County—that Cole sees for himself is epitomized by his obsession with Shady Beck, his brother’s ex-girlfriend, a college-educated young woman from a good family. But Shady lives in a reality very different from Cole’s dysfunctional life on the lake, a life that doesn’t require her to “turn your face a certain direction and keep your mouth shut” as Cole’s mother explains about life in Lake Holloway. Cole longs for what Shady’s doctor father and “Super Mom” want for her: “Endless possibility, hardcore transformation,” which Shady believes is what it “means to be young and American.”
Focusing on Cole’s desire to achieve this kind of transformation allows Gann to elevate his story above the clichés and conventions of a simple detective or mystery story. In fact, the book—and its artfully constructed narrative voice—offers a sly critique of stories that wrap their mysteries up too neatly. Gann tells us, “In real life no story works like that. In real life a story occurs among legions; to understand the story you have to know all the people it touches too.”
Gann does understand these legions of people. The novel moves effortlessly from the point of view of one character, be it Cole, Shady, Lyda, or Fleece’s drug lord boss—an immoral, controlling, dying patriarch named “Mister Greuel,” a man so twisted that he claims what he’ll miss after he’s gone is manipulating others—to the next, providing the reader with a complex and richly textured portrait of Cole’s community. At the same time, Cole struggles to find out what happened to his missing brother and come to terms with his family’s dark and violent past, a past that his mother and Greuel have been hiding from him since he was a young child.
The story is ultimately compelling, and once the main conflict is fully introduced—What happened to Fleece? Did he take off with Greuel’s biggest haul or did Greuel have him killed?—the book is nearly impossible to put down. If I have one hesitation, it is that I wish Gann would have gotten to the meat of the story sooner. Once he lets the reader fully understand the gravity of Fleece’s disappearance—on about page forty—the story starts to pick up momentum, gaining speed as the narrative continues and finally hooking us completely about halfway through the book.
At that point, there is no turning back—for the reader or for Cole, who loses all that’s left of his innocence in a gruesome but unforgettable scene near the middle of the narrative that comes full circle near the story’s conclusion. Readers who hang with the story to that point will experience a Kentucky that gets attention in the news media and in television shows but never with the insights and grace that only a first-rate novel such as this one can provide.
Originally published in the Bowling Green Daily News
March 8, 2016
Mysterious Book Report No. 65
John Dwaine McKenna
Ghosting by Kirby Gann is a new genre loosely termed “southern noir.” Noir, as regular readers of the MBR know, is dark, gloomy and generally concerns the troubled members of society, the outsiders, outlaws and outlandish ones among us . . . many of whom are involved in all types of criminal activity. Traditionally, noir stories take place in cities, but an increasing number of them are plotted and happen in the rural south: southern noir.
Ghosting is all about drugs; the use of, growing of, transporting of, the dealing, selling and control of drugs within defined geographic areas . . . in this case Pirtle County, Kentucky. In place of the usual collection of hip, inner-city characters, we’re introduced to a motley and sinister bunch of white southern rednecks engaged in organized crime. The group is controlled by Lawrence Greuel, who is dying, while his empire is being siphoned away by his partner, a ruthless sociopath named Arley Noe.
As the novel begins, Fleece Skaggs and Mister Greuel’s entire marijuana harvest for the year has gone missing; his younger half-brother Cole decides to take Fleeces place as a drug-runner, to try to find out what became of him, while their pill-addicted mother Lyda glides through the story looking for her next bottle of prescription pain-killers. Ghosting is a moody, atmospheric novel with some of the same best lyrical prose I’ve read in some time . . . and one of the most graphically vicious scenes I’ve ever read. Every page brought a new twist, or new surprise. If you want to read something new and different, it’s for you. I enjoyed it immensely.
John Dwaine McKenna
Ghosting by Kirby Gann is a new genre loosely termed “southern noir.” Noir, as regular readers of the MBR know, is dark, gloomy and generally concerns the troubled members of society, the outsiders, outlaws and outlandish ones among us . . . many of whom are involved in all types of criminal activity. Traditionally, noir stories take place in cities, but an increasing number of them are plotted and happen in the rural south: southern noir.
Ghosting is all about drugs; the use of, growing of, transporting of, the dealing, selling and control of drugs within defined geographic areas . . . in this case Pirtle County, Kentucky. In place of the usual collection of hip, inner-city characters, we’re introduced to a motley and sinister bunch of white southern rednecks engaged in organized crime. The group is controlled by Lawrence Greuel, who is dying, while his empire is being siphoned away by his partner, a ruthless sociopath named Arley Noe.
As the novel begins, Fleece Skaggs and Mister Greuel’s entire marijuana harvest for the year has gone missing; his younger half-brother Cole decides to take Fleeces place as a drug-runner, to try to find out what became of him, while their pill-addicted mother Lyda glides through the story looking for her next bottle of prescription pain-killers. Ghosting is a moody, atmospheric novel with some of the same best lyrical prose I’ve read in some time . . . and one of the most graphically vicious scenes I’ve ever read. Every page brought a new twist, or new surprise. If you want to read something new and different, it’s for you. I enjoyed it immensely.
November 30, 2012
A really excellent novel - right up there with the best I've read this year. Other reviewers have compared the novel to Daniel Woodrell's Winter's Bone, and the comparisons are apt, but Ghosting is a novel that stands by itself. The writing is so good, I found myself taking my time so as to really savor the sentences. Another thing I marveled at - there are no flat characters in this novel. Every character, however small a part they play, is fully realized. That's not something that's easy to do.
Impressive novel.
Impressive novel.
July 10, 2012
If Winter's Bone was a short sharp blow to the temple, Ghosting is a knife stuck up to its bolster and twisted slow in something vital. Terrifying, humane look at the price loyalty extracts from one crippled boy moving weed and oxy through E. Kentucky. I read it, finished it, flipped to the beginning and read it again.
July 28, 2012
I just lost interest about half way through and stopped reading.
November 21, 2013
A story reflecting reality, unfortunately. Slow start but it pulls you in, like quicksand. I found myself involved with the characters even though I didn't like any of them. Some of this book really creeps me out. One, because it has some incredibly graphic violence. Two, because the descriptions of said are so real one wonders if the descriptions are of actual events. Three, either the author has witnessed some extremes of human behavior or it's all in his imagination. I'm not sure which is more frightening.
September 1, 2012
Wow. This book is intense, sad, powerful, overwhelming, gruesome and hopeful. It is definitely outside of my normal fare, and honestly, I can't say I recommend it to anyone I know very well. But I absolutely will never regret having read it.
March 21, 2014
Excellent. Modern day Hamlet in the Rough Midwest of Kentucky. Highly recommended.
May 30, 2018
Harrowing and vivid Appalachian noir.
Want to read
June 1, 2012New York Times Sunday Book Review.
March 15, 2022
I picked up a copy of Ghosting at a library sale a few years ago and brought it to a family beach weekend, thinking I'd read a few pages and finish the rest at home. Instead, I found myself compelled to keep reading, bringing the book with me from room to room, getting sunburned reading it on a paddleboard in the middle of a lake. Kirby Gann's brutally realistic modern-Americana-Gothic captured my attention and refused to let it go. Even when writing in dialect, there are no hiccups to his prose, and the relationship horror felt deeply real. In a lot of ways, it's a novel about character as currency, honor and dignity becoming more precious in poverty, about obstinate obligation, and about refusing to leave the past behind when it's all you've really got. By the time I wrote this review, I'd read it three times and found it just as enjoyable the third time around.
September 7, 2022
Kirby Gann is the finest Southern Gothic author since William Gay briefly graced us with his writing.
The ending pissed me off so thoroughly
I read the entire book again. I am looking forward to the next.
The ending pissed me off so thoroughly
I read the entire book again. I am looking forward to the next.
February 14, 2023
i don’t even know how to describe this book. slow moving but also extremely captivating? probably one of my favorites because of how easily you are drawn in and attached to the story of each character. plays out so unexpectedly…
November 16, 2017
An intense story, written by what must be a brilliant guy who's seen some dark things. Plenty to keep me turning pages -- but compelling without being very enjoyable.
May 15, 2020
A well written book about really awlful human beings.
November 3, 2025
This is not the type of book I usually read but the title intrigued me. the writing wasn't great so I took a point off. the plot did hold my interest though.
June 16, 2021
Method: paperback
Rating: 2/5 stars
Drama: 2/5
Thoughts: Not a fan of this one..
June 17, 2012
“A high-low cocktail of lovely prose and cruel deeds…. Gann populates his novel with darkly beautiful images. . . . [Ghosting’s] mysteries are its rewards.” —The New York Times Book Review
"Tthe characters are fully realized—rooted in the land and veined with bad blood—and their motivations are complex and believable. Violent, bloody, and darkly beautiful, this is a fascinating novel depicting the seedy bottom of an America in decline.”—Publisher’s Weekly (starred review)
“Unfolding with unflinching clarity and moral inevitability, this is a tale of love and loyalty, family and duty, naïveté and duplicity, played out on an amoral landscape of drugs and violence. Hillbilly noir as literary fiction of the first order.”—Kirkus Reviews
“The prose pulses with terror and bad blood, the characters with yearning and humor, and this story latches onto you and doesn’t let go for hours.”—Flavorpill, “Must Read” for April 2012
"Tthe characters are fully realized—rooted in the land and veined with bad blood—and their motivations are complex and believable. Violent, bloody, and darkly beautiful, this is a fascinating novel depicting the seedy bottom of an America in decline.”—Publisher’s Weekly (starred review)
“Unfolding with unflinching clarity and moral inevitability, this is a tale of love and loyalty, family and duty, naïveté and duplicity, played out on an amoral landscape of drugs and violence. Hillbilly noir as literary fiction of the first order.”—Kirkus Reviews
“The prose pulses with terror and bad blood, the characters with yearning and humor, and this story latches onto you and doesn’t let go for hours.”—Flavorpill, “Must Read” for April 2012
December 19, 2012
I still haven't caught my breath. What a beautifully written, yet harrowing story that I can't stop thinking about. The book started off with a slow boil, and a pervading sense of doom following the main character, James Cole Prather, who is looking for his missing half-brother, Fleece. Nineteen, a little sad and sometimes not too smart, Cole is just beginning to decide who he is and what he wants from the world. He becomes entangled with the very men who may be responsible for Fleece's disappearance, including Blue Note, one of the creepiest characters I've ever encountered on the page. Gann's layering of mystery upon mystery combined with luminous writing and inevitable brutality had me spellbound. It is certainly not a book that will appeal to everyone, but it will definitely go on my list of favorites.
March 9, 2013
In GHOSTING, a young man in 1990s backwoods Kentucky yearns to find his older brother who went missing while running pot for small-time (but big ego-ed) local kingpins. Gann's visceral prose engulfs the reader in its rusty quarries and weedy sink holes, but a more careful outlining of the plot itself may have served him better; at a moment when the story finally starts to get going, I looked down and my Kindle said it had taken 50% of the text to get us there. Similarly, the ending is ultimately a whimpering anti-climax, rather than the banging denouement these meaty characters would deservedly get in the hands of, say, a Vince Gilligan. If you just can't get enough BREAKING BAD or SAVAGES, GHOSTING may be for you; the highlight is the flawed almost-romance between the protagonist and his brother's ex, intriguing and touching enough to almost make it worth the read.
March 28, 2013
James Cole has always been of two-worlds: the ho-hum middle class life of his aunt and uncle, and the hardscrabble existence of the lake, where his mother and half-brother reside. The latter prides itself on community, if not lawfulness, and the members of the lake always look out for each other. But when James’ brother Fleece disappears, no one seems to be able to help. Soon James must take his place as a runner for the local drug kingpin in order to get some answers. “With a plot as full of twists and turns as an ancient Greek tragedy, Kirby Gann’s Ghosting is one of the most beautifully worded and superbly crafted novels about the fateful consequences of being caught up in the criminal life that I have ever read. And I’m speaking truth,” says Donald Ray Pollock, author Knockemstiff and The Devil All the Time. A terrific addition to this growing sub-genre. - Ian
November 14, 2016
I Got to page 125 and had to quit, and to get this far took multiple days. This is one very boring book and by this point in an almost 300 page book, something has to make the reader want to proceed. The characters up to this point are one dimensional and behave as stereotypical as possible.
The author can write, he checks off as many of the MFA requirements that books these days feel the need to include, copying the styles of Cormac McCarthy and the descriptions by James Lee Burke, but mimicking these writers isn't the same as telling a story that these authors would tell. In this case the story is just not interesting, and I bet I can figure out the ending.
The author can write, he checks off as many of the MFA requirements that books these days feel the need to include, copying the styles of Cormac McCarthy and the descriptions by James Lee Burke, but mimicking these writers isn't the same as telling a story that these authors would tell. In this case the story is just not interesting, and I bet I can figure out the ending.
November 27, 2013
I wanted to like this book more. The writing was beautiful and portrayed poetically the difficult lives of the characters. The mood was dark and you could feel the gritty world Cole and Greuel's crew inhabited especially contrasted with Shady's charmed life. However the pacing was off for me. I didn't get pulled in fully until about halfway through and then everything seemed to happen at once. I did like the ambiguity at the end surrounding Cole but the final pages with Shady sort of fizzled out.
August 10, 2025
A story reflecting reality, unfortunately. Slow start but it pulls you in, like quicksand. I found myself involved with the characters even though I didn't like any of them. Some of this book really creeps me out. One, because it has some incredibly graphic violence. Two, because the descriptions of said are so real one wonders if the descriptions are of actual events. Three, either the author has witnessed some extremes of human behavior or it's all in his imagination. I'm not sure which is more frightening.
May 10, 2012
I really enjoyed this book -- it's great writing, and I think the author did an excellent job at writing from various characters' points of view. It was an interesting story about a culture and place I know absolutely nothing about. There were some scenes where I felt like I was the characters -- very disconcerting!
June 15, 2012
oops, guess I didn't save my review. The thrust of it was this: wish I had written this book. Gann's Kentucky is dark, disturbing, and almost romantically decayed. My favorite line goes something like this (to describe the protagonist's junkie mother): Lyda doesn't remember so much as she free associates . . .
October 4, 2012
heartbreaking, grim, and beautiful. complex, sympathetic characters drive a plot with mystery at its heart. a tough book, and a good one.
(full disclosure: i had the privilege several years ago of being in a workshop led by kirby gann. i read another of his novels, "napoleon in rags", and admired his writing then. after "ghosting", i still do.)
(full disclosure: i had the privilege several years ago of being in a workshop led by kirby gann. i read another of his novels, "napoleon in rags", and admired his writing then. after "ghosting", i still do.)
paused
November 2, 2012I really wanted to keep reading this one, but the overly ornate language is proving to be too dense for me right now. This book has all the qualities that I look for in a good read--gothic setting, complex characters with interlocking stories, and gorgeous prose--so I hope I can pick it back up again another time when I'm more ready to immerse myself.
June 3, 2013
This has been a very interesting read. The setting is dark and hopeless and the characters are fascinating. While I've really enjoyed this novel, it's taken me longer to get through than most. I find myself almost having to prepare myself for the read. It's a world filled with despair, one that I hope to never visit.
September 15, 2012
Hmm. I liked this, despite some problems I had with the mystery part. The writing is just beautiful. But it's a little ornate and gets in the way of the mystery. I'm still not even sure what really happened mystery-wise --
Displaying 1 - 30 of 51 reviews