Ghost Healer

Cal Rourke does not think of himself as a ghost hunter. He thinks of himself as someone who corrects errors.

The ghosts he encounters are not the kind that rattle chains or haunt the living out of malice. They are people who stayed because they believed something that was not true - a woman who spent sixty years keeping a room ready for a man who died before he could return, a retired schoolteacher who constructed an elaborate theory to explain why time had stopped rather than accept that she was dead, a print shop owner who could not leave the business he had built because something in it had been moved six feet from where it belonged. In every case, the presence is organized around a wrong external fact. Find the fact. Correct it. Watch them go.

For three years Cal has driven the back roads of the American South, working cases that reach him through word of mouth and a sparse website with no name on it. He is methodical, patient, and genuinely skilled at what he does. He can read a room the way other people read faces. He knows what grief smells like, what long-established waiting feels like in the air of a house, what it means when the temperature drops in a doorway. He has closed dozens of cases across Georgia, South Carolina, Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana, and he has gotten good enough at the work that its cost - the physical toll, the isolation, the particular loneliness of a life spent in other people's unfinished business - has become background noise he no longer examines.

Then he finds himself sitting across from Destiny MacGee, a therapist in Savannah who does not believe him and cannot stop being curious about him. In their sessions, she begins asking the questions he has been successfully avoiding for years: What does he actually believe about his own life? What is he looking for in all those empty houses? What happened to the golden childhood he describes - the Sunday mornings before his parents' divorce that he has held intact in his memory as evidence that things were once right?

Cal is very good at finding the wrong external fact in other people's lives. He is considerably less practiced at recognizing one in his own.

Ghost Healer is a literary novel about grief, memory, and the stories people tell themselves to stay in place. It is set in the specific light and heat of the American South, in old houses and print shops and motel rooms and the long silences between cases. It asks what it would mean to heal yourself the same way you heal everyone else - and whether you would be willing to find out what you have been organizing everything around not knowing.