Not even 30, Maggie Glenn is nevertheless haunted. She lives almost entirely in her past, haunted by a lover she cannot forget and by a father she cannot forgive. Indeed, the first word of Maggie’s narrative is the single word “Ghosts” (7). Although she is referring to the spooky quiet of the newspaper offices where she works, ghosts define her character. Maggie struggles to live in two tenses simultaneously, past and present. The assignment that returns her to the South Carolina hill country gives her the chance to exorcise those ghosts and live tentatively in the present.

Maggie has made her father into a hobgoblin, a psychological complex that, for her, embodies the essence of parental neglect and emotional indifference. As a first-person narrative from Maggie’s perspective, the novel never engages the reader directly. Rather, the father is his daughter’s perception. As such, we begin to suspect that the father Maggie shares with us represents less who or what he is and more who and what Maggie is. More than 10 years after the kitchen accident, Maggie cannot forgive herself for the catastrophe that so disfigured her brother. She was older, and she was de facto left in charge.