American Ghost

If you’re an author with a family ghost, it would seem almost obligatory to write about it. Hannah Nordhaus’ “paternal grandfather’s maternal grandmother,” Julia Staab, haunts La Posada hotel in Santa Fe (or so lots of people believe). In American Ghost, Nordhaus offers a fascinating and nuanced account of her ancestral ghost story and her…

Janis Owens’ Southern Gothic American Ghost is equal parts mystery and thriller, populated with slippery characters inhabiting a backwoods swampland hamlet forever haunted by a Depression-era lynching. Indeed, Owens based her fourth novel on the infamous 1934 lynching of Claude Neal in Marianna, Florida. Still, while the novel is rooted in a real-life incident, it…