A City of Ghosts
By Betsy Phillips
CreateSpace, $14.99
To Betsy Phillips, ghosts are all around us.
“Most people don’t notice ghosts for the same reason you don’t notice your own breathing. Air slips in and out of our bodies without us having to think too much about it. Our souls slip in and out of our bodies without us having to think too much about it. All the noise and motion ghosts make, going about their business, once we’re grown, usually fades into the background, forgotten along with the rest of our imaginary friends, ” Phillips writes in her debut collection of short stories, “A City of Ghosts.”
“We don’t notice not because there’s no such thing as ghosts, but because, in a sense, there is nothing but ghosts.”
Phillips makes it her aim to shine a light on all those ghosts we’ve forgotten about, or just never noticed. Or convinced ourselves weren’t real. Except – and this is the delicious twist – they’re not real. And not in the “of course ghosts aren’t real!” way. Every story in the collection is plucked not out of local Nashville lore (the stories are all set in and around the Music City), but out of Phillips’ curious, playful and sometimes macabre imagination.
Each story keys on a person or place or event in Nashville – the flooding this past spring plays a big part in several of the stories – so that it seems just plausible enough to be an authentic piece of Nashville’s haunted history. Were you to tell any of these stories to enough people around a crackling fire on a waning evening in October, the stories would, over time, grow legs and eventually settle down comfortably between the Bell Witch and Capt. Ryman.
Phillips, a popular Nashville blogger and the Marketing and New Media Associate for Vanderbilt University Press, has been writing conversationally for so long that she makes storytelling seem effortless. Her reliable, level-headed narrator isn’t above cracking nervous jokes when in the pursuit of a tale. And yet the prose is never clichéd or hokey. Think less rattling chains and moans and more devil’s doorways and tunnels beneath the city harboring dark secrets.
It is rare to find both beautiful writing and spot-on comedic writing in ghost stories, but Phillips provides so much of both that one has to imagine the ghosts she describes beaming with pride.
The collection is as much a great big love letter to Nashville – and its rural nooks and crannies – as it is a ghost story compilation. Phillips, who spends much of her free time exploring the area surrounding Nashville and writing about it at her blog and at the Nashville Scene’s blog, Pith in the Wind, has a clearly loving curiosity about her adopted hometown.
Readers who are at least somewhat familiar with Nashville names and places will no doubt get more out of the stories than, say, someone who’s never set foot in Davidson County.
You can’t help but feel some pretty intense pain being exorcised in the writing. The ghost of the May 2010 flood looms large in Phillips’ heart, and provides the catalyst for one of the collection’s most heartbreaking stories, “We Are Our Own Ghosts, ” in which an old woman cannot comprehend all the things the flood took from her, including herself.
But I don’t want to mislead by calling the collection a love letter. The business of being haunted isn’t romantic and flowery, after all, no matter how much you love a place. Phillips also introduces us to gruesome events and the horrible people who populate her city of ghosts, and she incorporates plenty of historical injustice to explain why so many souls have so much trouble finding their way off this earth.
Without question, the stories are creepy and unsettling, and you find yourself wondering just how much the author knows about the city – and its invisible friends – that the rest of us don’t.
Published Oct. 10, 2010, on The Commercial Appeal’s books page