Kate’s Review: “Ghost Wall”

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Book: “Ghost Wall” by Sarah Moss

Publishing Info: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, January 2019

Where Did I Get This Book: I own it

Where You Can Get This Book: WorldCat.org | Amazon | Indiebound

Book Description: In the north of England, far from the intrusions of cities but not far from civilization, Silvie and her family are living as if they are ancient Britons, surviving by the tools and knowledge of the Iron Age.

For two weeks, the length of her father’s vacation, they join an anthropology course set to reenact life in simpler times. They are surrounded by forests of birch and rowan; they make stew from foraged roots and hunted rabbit. The students are fulfilling their coursework; Silvie’s father is fulfilling his lifelong obsession. He has raised her on stories of early man, taken her to witness rare artifacts, recounted time and again their rituals and beliefs—particularly their sacrifices to the bog. Mixing with the students, Silvie begins to see, hear, and imagine another kind of life, one that might include going to university, traveling beyond England, choosing her own clothes and food, speaking her mind.

The ancient Britons built ghost walls to ward off enemy invaders, rude barricades of stakes topped with ancestral skulls. When the group builds one of their own, they find a spiritual connection to the past. What comes next but human sacrifice?

A story at once mythic and strikingly timely, Sarah Moss’s Ghost Wall urges us to wonder how far we have come from the “primitive minds” of our ancestors.

Review: Every once in awhile I try to do a tidying up on my Kindle and pick a book I haven’t read yet that has been stagnating and read it. It’s probably no surprise that I have a tendency to get books and then kind of forget about them. During my most recent check in, I remembered that I had the book “Ghost Wall” by Sarah Moss, which caught my eye a couple years ago but then I never picked it up. I decided that it was high time to rectify that, and jumped in, devouring it in one sitting.

Now it’s partially true the ‘one sitting’ circumstance was because this is a novella, but “Ghost Wall” also kept me at rapt attention because of the slow burn build up on unease to discomfort to absolute frayed nerves. We follow Silvie, a teenage girl whose father, due to his eccentric and strict need to make his family live the way an Iron Age family would, is accompanying her father, mother, and a group of University students and their professor on an immersive field trip to ‘live like the Iron agers would’. From the very start we know that something is wrong with this family dynamic, as Silvie is always trying to remain small and unobtrusive while her mother is straight up terrified, and as we learn more about their history and her father’s control of his wife and daughter we soon realize that this is a very dangerous situation at hand. Add in academic outsiders who don’t realize the danger and the actual obsession that this man has, ESPECIALLY if they are women, and Silvie becomes more and more on edge as her father pulls more and more men from the expedition under his spell due to his ‘knowledge’ and manipulative prowess. As we charge towards the climax, the reader just feels like something dreadful is going to happen and it pulls itself so tight it could violently snap at any time. I was both scared to see how it would all end, but also needed to know.

But it’s also an interesting critique on toxic masculinity, power, and how history is held up as a pinnacle of a purer time for incredibly sinister reasons. For the professor and the students all of this is theoretical and they can separate themselves from it to an extent. For Sylvie and her mom they have to live with a man who is violent, especially when he feels disrespected and powerless, and who forced them into this role because he HIMSELF felt powerless and became obsessed with finding it anywhere he could, i.e. through a patriarchal Iron Age family structure (but like so many regressionists who love ‘the good old days’, it is more based on misogyny and racism than anyhting else). As we see more and more people start to become very invested in building a ‘ghost wall’, the academics and the psychopathic family abuser alike start to become more and more unhinged, and while it’s almost certainly a message of ‘in some ways humans aren’t so different from a more ‘primitive’ time’, I also thought it was a message about who gets power and who gets put in positions of power, sometimes to the detriment of others. I quite enjoyed that aspecf of this book.

My only qualm is that the ending feels a little rushed and maybe a little to neat. I didn’t need it to be super complex or muddled, but it did make me go ‘well… that’s pretty convenient’. Not a huge ding, but one I wanted to mention.

Overall I’m glad I finally read “Ghost Wall”! It’s fast and deeply unsettling, so if you are looking for a quick horror novella that will suck you in, give it a whirl!

Rating 7: An unsettling build up of suspense about walls, human nature, and what defines a primitive society (and how perhaps modernity doesn’t preclude us from that).

Reader’s Advisory:

“Ghost Wall” is included on the Goodreads list “Horrortok”.