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Winifred Rudge, a bemused writer struggling to get beyond the runaway success of her mass-market astrology book, travels to London to jump-start her new novel about a woman who is being haunted by the ghost of Jack the Ripper. Upon her arrival, she finds that her stepcousin and old friend John Comestor has disappeared, and a ghostly presence seems to have taken over his apartment in the nineteenth-century rowhouse once owned by Winnie's great-great-grandfather. Is it the spirit of this ancestor, who, family legend claims, was Charles Dickens's childhood inspiration for Ebenezer Scrooge? Could it be the ghostly remains of Jack the Ripper? Or a phantasm derived from a more arcane and insidious origin?
Winnie begins to investigate, but John's erstwhile girlfriend, Allegra, is aggressively unhelpful, and his downstairs neighbor, the cat-obsessed Mrs. Maddingly, is growing stranger by the day.
Gripped by inspiration and desperation alike, Winnie finds herself the
unwilling audience for a drama of specters and shades, some from her
family's peculiar history and some from her own unvanquished past.
In
the spirit of A. S. Byatt's Possession, with dark overtones echoing
from A Christmas Carol, Lostpresents a rich fictional world that will
enrapture Gregory Maguire's eager audience.
10 pages, Audio CD
First published October 1, 2001
Maguire has served as artist-in-residence at the Blue Mountain Center, the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, and the Hambidge Center. He lives in Concord, Massachusetts.
" ...because what really is the job of the dead? It's not to hang around, but to disappear--to clear the air for the living. Once the living had discharged their duties to their dead relatives and companions, they could go back to living a full life. The goal of a ghost is to dismiss it and leave the living to have a full life without guilt or undue grief. "
From what I knew, rewrote stories and fairy-tales into the "true story" for adults, which I enjoyed quite a bit with Wicked.
Lost, however, is a wholly new story that references A Christmas Carol, Jack the Ripper, Peter Pan, and Alice in Wonderland. This sounds like an interesting concept, I'm sure, but while G.M. is throwing the references in here and there, it's like he forgot about the main story line. Winnie/Wendy/Ophelia/Opal the main character comes to town, finds that her cousin (and former lover apparently, but you have to read that in the book, it isn't on the dust jacket or anything), John is missing. She stays in his house, harasses John's neighbors, employers, and girlfriend about his whereabouts (turns out he was just avoiding her). Contractors are fixing the house when she arrives, they bust down a wall and let out a ghost of some sort. The ghost possesses a cat and makes it eat other cats, then possesses an old lady and makes her eat cats, too. While this is going on, you don't know it's a possession, though, you believe that it was just the old lady being bonkers and eating her cats. You find out at the end of chapter 4. Winendophelal throws a temper tantrum at her cousin when he comes back into the picture, she runs away, she goes to see the old lady, and then she herself becomes possessed.
Honestly, if you want to skip the first two chapters all together, just read the back of the book.
The main character answers all questions with a snide remark or another question. Reading is like playing one of those three-dollar PC games where you have to investigate some strange happenings, no one gives you a straight answer, and at the end you find out the bad guy is the person that asked for help in the first place.
I read a lot of bad reviews about the book before I read it. I didn't hear the best things about before I read it either and I was pleasantly surprised, unfortunately didn't have the same effect on me.
If someone should happen to read it and decide that it is a great book, I would love to speak to this person and get their point of view. I'm almost hoping there was a deeper meaning in there somewhere that I just missed.
Though this was not the best book ever, I'll probably still continue to read books for the twisted fairy-tale fun.