Ghost Driver

by Nell Osbourne

Malory walks home after an ordinarily gruelling night out, having escaped the company of her associates. Something ripples in the darkness. The shape of a figure. So begins a chain of events with the texture of dream plasma. A story of persecution mania. Professional ignominy. A sudden disappearance. The terror of seeing oneself too clearly...

Part horror story, part tragicomic nightmare, Ghost Driver is a slim shudder of a novel about a woman who has taken every wrong turn available to her.

Genres: Horror, Novels

176 pages, Paperback

Published September 30, 2025

Reviews

[Paul Fulcher · Rating 4 out of 5]

Winner of the 2026 Queen Mary Small Press Fiction Prize

Ghost Driver is the debut novel of Nell Osbourne, a poet, novelist & researcher of experimental literature & feminism, and is MOIST BOOKS entry for the 2026 Queen Mary Small Press Fiction Prize.

This is a highly distinctive read - comparisons are hard, although it's subversive, and at times surreal, take on modern life reminded me of Isabel Waidner - some of the author's own references are included in a list at the end of my review.

It's set in a near-future world where municipal England has increadingly disappeared into commercial development, and the subject of the novel, Malory, works, as the novel opens, in an amorphous corporate/academic and Kafkesque entity, The Institution:

The Institution was like a tumour that had slowly taken over the city, had devoured it by acquiring more and more land, then building more and more austere white cubes with restricted access and sharp corners upon that land. Just like a tumour, The Institution was both educational and parasitical, rebuilding the body’s body, as an idea, from the inside out, in such a way that defied the very idea of the body as a shared enterprise. It was also a secure centralised hub for commercial distribution. It was also an inclusive meeting place for diverse people of all nations, whilst respecting the global sanctity of those rules created and upheld by wealth, convenience, and hypocrisy.

Although this isn't a story of capitalism vs art and academia per se, perhaps more how they come together. In the interview linked below, the author refers to the University of Manchester's property development as an example (see e.g. here) and Malory acknowledges:

Sensitive and artistic intellectuals had been enthusiastically welcomed into the folds of The Institution from the very beginning.  They operated its drearily impersonal cogs with a kind of sanguine torpor, their art and writings no evidently worse or better. 

But Malory herself is not such an individual - introverted (the author refers to Shy Radicals: The Antisystemic Politics of the Militant Introvert as an inspiration), and suffering from chronic pain, whose source is undiagnosed, she simply can't manifest the 'warm fuzzy-feelings' that the Institution requires:

Malory was failing to progress in life. She had received multiple warnings at work for poor institutional behaviour, for perceived miserabilism and, as she had inferred from the vague language used to describe her infractions, for failing at collegiality. She was far too sticky, she was fundamentally viscous in some indefinable way, everything was sticking to her and in that way, she was also making things uncomfortable and awkward for everyone else. An institutional colleague should strive to achieve the opposite effect, to impart the workplace with a kind of frictionless ease; the interpersonal plane should resemble an experience that was cushiony and nothingy and would fade quickly from memory. But Malory didn’t know how to restructure her personhood in any workable way. She was wracked with a malcontent that felt like a windstorm threatening to carry her off the edge of the cliff.

A novel that is hard to review - although below I link to two writers who've done it more justice than I can - but which demands to be read.

Interview with the author

https://www.tank.tv/magazine/issue-10...

Two illuminating reviews of the novel

https://www.culturematters.org.uk/bod...

https://corridor8.co.uk/article/nell-...

MOIST BOOKS

MOIST BOOKS exists to put a dampener on the mainstream 'literary' gatekeepers, juicing up the tentative fumblings on the fringes.

Inspired by the North American DIY publishing traditions that grew out of art, music, and LGBTQI+ scenes, MOIST publishes works of literary fiction, creative non-fiction, and poetry in series of threes. Each of these ‘seasons’ is loosely based around a common theme, and seeks to acknowledge a diverse range of lived experiences, educational backgrounds, and cultural reference points. This shouldn’t be read as a euphemism for poverty porn or ‘bake-off blandness’ however, but as a preference for formally innovative, emotionally immediate books, and a vibe that is as much global as it is local.

The author's list of some works which informed Ghost Driver

~ ‘Ice’ by Anna Kavan, 1967.
~ ‘Red Tory: My Corbyn Chemsex Hell’ by Spitzenprodukte (Huw Lemmey), Montez Press, 2019
~ ‘The Driver’s Seat’ by Muriel Spark, 1970.
~ ‘Vengeance is Mine’ by Marie NDiaye, 2023.
~ ‘Blood and Guts in Highschool’ by Kathy Acker, 1984.
~ ‘Yes, I Am A Destroyer’ by Mira Mattar, MA Bibliotheque, 2020 / Litmus Press (upcoming), 2025.
~ ‘I Don’t Care’ by Ágota Kristóf, 2005. trans. Chris Andrews, Penguin Books, 2024.
~ ‘The Seers’ by Sulaiman Addonia, Prototype, 2023
~ ‘The Descent of Alette’ by Alice Notley, 1996.
~ ‘Lodgers’ by Holly Pester, Granta, 2024.
~ ‘The Weight of Things’ by Marianne Fritz, 1978. trans. Adrian Nathan West, Verso Books, 2017.
~ ‘Holes’ by Hilary White, MA Bibliotheque, 2024.
~ ‘Hangsaman’ by Shirley Jackson, 1951.
~ ‘The Employees’ by Olga Ravn, 2018, trans. Martin Aitken, Lolli Editions, 2018,

Queen Mary Small Press Fiction Prize judges' citations

Our prize judge Marina Benjamin writes:

Stylishly written and darkly funny, Nell Osborne’s novel is a nightmarish vision of alienation and anomie, of unsatisfactory situationships and working lives defined by phoney goals and empty rituals. It brings administrative noir into the orbit of body horror—as if Ottessa Moshfegh had written severance. Moist Books celebrates writing ‘at the fringes’ with work that amplifies unease, even disgust with the present, and ghost driver is the perfect mascot for this ambition.

Judge Susanna Crossman writes:

Ghost Driver by Nell Osborne is a brilliant vital eerie exploration of Malary and the horror of her (and our) contemporary lives. In this novel, Nell Osborne smartly channels Freud’s uncanny, the familiar becomes unfamiliar as Malary navigates with creeping horror: office politics, body dysmorphia, drunk nights, relationships and a giant fly. Published by moist books, this funny, dark and highly intelligent book encapsulates their mission statement to champion literature emerging from unease, books written on ‘the fringe’.

And judge Stu Hennigan writes:

Ghost Driver by Nell Osborne is a shape-shifting gem powered by an effortlessly hip voice that crackles with restless energy. Its boundary-blurring blending of the personal with the political, and the uncanny with the mundane, is as beguiling and fresh as modern fiction gets. This refusal of easy categorisation, one of the novel’s most appealing characteristics, is entirely in synch with the ethos of its publisher, for whom clear distinctions between styles, forms and genres are simply barriers there to be broken.

[Marc · Rating 4 out of 5]

I read this because it was shortlisted for (and co-won) the 2026 Queen Mary Small Press Fiction Prize (courtesy of its submission via Moist Books).

"Malory considered the idea that her life had joined the ranks of people whose lives stood as useful pedagogical models for how not to do it. A textbook example of misfortune, of bathetically wasted potentiality."

Is Malory being followed? Is she part of the problem, the whole problem, or a victim in this slightly offbeat world? Our MC may be delusional or her entire life is one of being gaslit... It's hard to say. I found myself sort of pulled along by Osbourne's debut novel without really finding a foothold narratively, nor emotionally. I found Malory sympathetic, ridiculous, paranoid, insightful, delusional, funny, and nearly tragic. She's not what her employer wants her to be (largely, more social/positive), not what her lover wants her to be, and it's hard to say about her friend. And perhaps that's exactly the strength of this book: It's fuzzy--the dividing lines have been blurred, but it's still quite clear when you're not meeting social/work/gender expectations, and life itself continues to be driven by a lowkey, invisible malevolence whose horror the body registers even if the mind can't always.

"'I'm just saying that there's something in the writing that's off. It's in the writing. I think it could be worth listening to the warning signs. It's in the writing itself!'
'What is?'
'Whatever it is that lives in writing... something dangerous... something uncontrollable... I don't know. But it's there and we should listen.'"

[Amy V · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was surreal and beautiful and I was hooked from start to finish.

[Joshua Jones · Rating 4 out of 5]

A page-turning wince of a novel set in the present’s dystopian half-life, frequently hilarious in a grimacing kind of way. Horror lurks always in the comedy of its sharply depicted quotidian dismay of life in which suffering’s origins can feel retroactively tacked on, incommensurate internalizations of external shittery that don’t quite add up. It reads a bit like the troubled aftermath of a jaunty Acker-Kafka marriage of harsh-job-center-lighting convenience, doused in the post-Room-101 hum of a rickety work laptop. The ending lost me a little, but the journey there was haunted and bitter funny. I enjoyed this novel a lot!

[Karin · Rating 5 out of 5]

Debut that keeps you hooked to the last page

I like debut novels, more than any other book they have the power to surprise. When I read the blurb on the back of Nell Osborne ’s debut, Ghost Driver , I was sold, my expectations raised sky-high. They never came down, not crashing, not even gradually, as I started reading.

Ghost Driver is dark, Ghost Driver is comic. It feels weird, but also weirdly familiar. It’s different and addictive. The prose is brilliant, flowing, keeping you hooked from one line to the next, from chapter to chapter, to the end.

Nell Osborne’s, Ghost Driver: Five stars (the maximum of six for exceptional books on my own review site), and on my want-to-read-again-shelf.

[Martha · Rating 5 out of 5]

full to the brim with wonderful sentences, massive flies and slime. an all together different kind of architecture, a commune of ghosts with bent spines.
i too once almost drank a slug - probably have without knowing.
all writers working in universities should gather in a circle and hold hands(with me).

[Snail Busfield · Rating 3 out of 5]

All the like dungeon hallways and creepy lads got me thinking about the entrance to 42s

[Candela Martínez · Rating 4 out of 5]

My sinterklaas gift was a very weird but pleasantly written tingy

[Gumble's Yard - Golden Reviewer · Rating 4 out of 5]

The Institution was like a tumour that had slowly taken over the city, had devoured it by acquiring more and more land, then building more and more austere white cubes with restricted access and sharp corners upon that land. Just like a tumour, The Institution was both educational and parasitical, rebuilding the body's body, as an idea, from the inside out, in such a way that defied the very idea of the body as a shared enterprise, It was also a secure centralised hub for commercial distribution. It was also an inclusive meeting place for diverse people of all nations, whilst respecting the global sanctity of those rules created and upheld by wealth, convenience, and hypocrisy.

 
Joint Winner of the 2026 Queen Mary Small Press Fiction Prize (the first year of the rebranded Republic of Consciousness Prize).
 
Published by the Nottingham and London based Moist Books: We publish writing that emerges from profound unease, dissatisfaction, or disgust with the present. While sometimes our books take form as works of fiction or poetry or memoir, we are principally concerned with writing at the fringes: texts that seek to counter neat or industrialised distinctions between genres, categories and forms.”  This is their first longlisting.
 
The author is a writer and former Manchester based PhD researcher (Manchester and its University sponsored development providing the inspiration for the very much unnamed setting of this novel I believe) who has previously published poetry pamphlets, jointly set up a zine series (which feels very relevant to this book, “Academics Against Networking“- a creative and critical response to the ongoing institutionalisation of Networking Culture within academia; as a site of resistance to the banal perversion of language & knowledge that it enforces, and its boring extrovert tactics and (also highly relevant) is working on a non-fiction project about “shyness, secrecy and writing”.  This is her debut novel.
 
And it’s a novel which reminded me of the work of of Olga Ravn (particularly the International Booker Prize listed “Employees”) Ben Pester (with his Goldsmith listed “Expansion Project” and short stories) with the former’s allegorical, art-infused look at job-as-identity and the latter’s slightly surreal, sometimes Kafkaesque examination of late-capitalism, all perhaps mixed up with the feminist but also elusive and eerie writing about the body which was a dominant strand of the Grant Best of Young British Novelists list (Sarah Bernstein – who blurbs this book, Camilla Grudova, Sophie Mackintosh and so on).
 
Narrated in close third person from the viewpoint of Malory various strands of her life are interleaved: a series of mysterious ailments and often excruciating pains she suffers and the indifference towards or inability to solve them of the medical community – Doctors, physios and therapists; her work at The Institution – an academic body which seems to have both encompassed the whole city and itself been encompassed by liberal-capitalism – although we view this work more through the self-development training in whose seeming purpose (of subjugating self to institution) she does not participate – hampering her career development and worse (at a crucial point in the novel she is summoned to a hearing/reckoning to be accused and punitively convicted of Institutionally Antisocial); her relationship with her lover John – a confident award-winning novelist, himself advancing rapidly in his institutional career; her long-term friendship with the outlandish Ellie now training to be a psychic and who has worrying premonitions of Malory’s fate; her vivid dream life which increasingly merges with her real life (one of the novel’s themes being the porous nature of existence).

Overall, I thought this was a fascinating novel of ideas – an oblique but effective examination of the way society (cities, academia and so on) is shaped by late-capitalism – and how this impacts on the individual.



Sometimes within certain feelings there can be other feelings, crystalline and just beneath the surface; topographies within topographies, architectures within architectures. Beneath the feeling of needing and losing - of making oneself small and humanitarian to the point of victimhood, so others could be temporarily bigger and implacable to the point of masculinity - there was already such an undercurrent, a heartlessness. A blunt understanding that repetition is the only game that familiarity knows how to play. Familiar things are greedily sought out, in the manner of an anteater navigating a trail through dirt; the result savoured for some long-forgotten reason that brings neither, strictly, pleasure nor pain. Some other rippling-out thing, spreading-thing; tugging-thing; like scratching at an expanse of skin off-handedly and somehow calling a well-defined and aggravating mosquito bite into being; a feeling that arrives after the gesture has already been performed. The body knows its routes to get around after all.

[Ian Durant · Rating 4 out of 5]

I loved the freshness of the voice of Nell Osborne brought to us from radical publisher of fringe works, Moist. The writing is styled round the inner workings of the mind of the female protagonist, including those unspoken and uncensored thoughts and addressing how the individual relates to others and the institutions within which our lives are lived. There are memorable vignettes which have a surreal tinge of the extreme based in banality - a fly buzzing or a slug accidentally swallowed. The book inhabits a world of dreams, nightmares and paranoia, told with black comedy. I really look forward to reading more of Nell Osborne’s work.