Screens and artificial intelligence have shown up regularly in the horror genre since the dawn of the personal computer. “Ghost in the machine” stories are so common that, when I submitted a proposal for a horror novel about technology, my editor warned me against deploying a malevolent A.I. as my antagonist.
But it’s hard to find scary stories that depict how we become the ghosts in the machine. The anxiety we feel when our virtual connections outweigh our real ones is more often a subject for nonfiction, such as a 2018 New York Times article headlined “A Dark Consensus About Screens and Kids Begins to Emerge in Silicon Valley.” A quote in the piece from a Silicon Valley office worker — “I am convinced the devil lives in our phones” — has stuck with me like the tagline on a dog-eared vintage horror paperback.
Ionce asked the great historian Richard Southern whether he would like to have met any of the medieval saints and churchmen about whom he wrote so eloquently. He gave a cautious reply: ‘I think they probably had very bad breath.’ He may have been right about that, but it would be wrong to infer that this was something which didn’t bother them. The men and women of the Middle Ages may have had a greater aversion to unpleasant body odours than their descendants do now. If so, this was bad luck, for they were much more likely to encounter them than we are in our deodorised world.
#AloneTogether has been trotted out a lot during the pandemic, but this was personal. I felt comforted that my Edinburgh neighbors, a group of strangers I’ll never meet, internalized our presence and the reason behind it. Though quarantining far from home, we were embedded in a neighborhood, surrounded by kind people.
In Ghost Wood Song, Waters leans into themes of family, shame, grief, and legacy. Her prose and setting are rich, and Shady’s voice is one many young people will be able to relate to as she navigates relationships and hardship. Like many of the other characters, she is secretive and interior. At times, this made it feel like the story was happening more inside her than around her, and because of this I felt disconnected from some of the biggest plot reveals. Similarly, I was sometimes surprised by characters’ opaque intentions. Perhaps this was part of the point, however — often people are unknowable.
It is only October and already
the snow is falling. I watch it
change direction with the wind.