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Swipe Right on 21st Century Terror: Jason Arnopp’s Ghoster
When humanity looks back on our present day and is tempted to give it a nifty descriptor a’la “the Gilded Age,” chances are good it will include a clever play on the word “screen.” After all, our lives are increasingly governed by flat slabs of glass; our mutual societal obsession with the images, videos, and text streaming across our little handheld devices more or less defines modern life—everything from getting a job to meeting the love of your life is now conducted via a screen.
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Jason Arnopp (The Last Days of Jack Sparks) uses this fact of modern life to horrifying effect in his second novel, Ghoster. The book functions both as a narrative and a series of effective tricks played on the reader, slowly drawing you into its disturbing, twisted vision of our reality. By the time you figure out what’s actually occurring behind the plot, it’s too late—you’re trapped, just like the characters.
The story begins like a thriller. Kate Collins is a paramedic working in Leeds who’s wrapping up her life there in order to move in with her boyfriend of a few months, Scott. She’s changed jobs, given up her flat, and arranged for movers to take all her stuff to Brighton. The only problem is that Scott has suddenly stopped responding to her texts and calls. To late to change course, Kate arrives at their new shared residence only to find it empty—save for Scott’s abandoned cellphone.
The plot stabs forward and back in alternating timelines, a structure that allows Arnopp to juggle several cliffhangers at any given time; we see Kate meeting and falling in love with Scott, then step back into the present to continue the mystery. In the past, Karen meets Scott at the “digital detox” retreat she signed up for in the fallout from her own poor decisions—specifically, her stalking of an ex-boyfriend, which inadvertently led to an event that caused grievous injury to her former co-worker and best friend Izzy. Struggling with her screen addiction, Kate now uses a simple flip-phone lacking data and internet access, and says daily gratitudes like anyone else in recovery.
In the present, Kate dives into Scott’s smartphone history with the jagged enthusiasm of an addict falling off the wagon. What she finds is a treasure trove of the creepy and unsettling: Scott continued to maintain his Tinder account and arranged meetings with several women while dating Kate, and his phone is packed with disturbing pornography, videos of various people sleeping, and a secret diary app with an encrypted password. All Kate can read are the lurid titles of Scott’s many entries.
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The story slowly revs up into something more than a missing person thriller as Kate continues to obsess over Scott’s fate and experiences some hair-raising moments in her time spent exploring the vacant apartment, which she visits every day to discover the doors have been damaged, as if by a wild animal. Kate begins to experience what can only be described as hauntings—visitations by literal ghosts who resemble some of the people sleeping in the videos, who might be just as missing as Scott—even though all of their social media accounts (including his) continue to be active, churning out vapid likes on cat videos and pop culture polls. Through it all, Kate maintains a bright, instantly cool voice—smart and slightly sarcastic, she is a believable representation of an adult woman dealing with home-grown problems in a flawed but mature manner; she seems like a good person to have a beer with, at least when her life isn’t falling apart.
And then, the story shifts again, onto a wilder and even more uncharted path, branching off of our modern-day screen affliction. Arnopp litters the story with clues and red herrings that nudge you towards one plausible conclusion or another, but this isn’t a book to try to second-guess; this is a story following its own unique set of rules. Arnopp has crafted a tightly-plotted, scary-as-heck book that pivots on a question anyone who has ever felt too attached to their smartphone will identify with: what happens to our online selves after we’ve left the physical world behind? The most frightening answer, the novel suggests, might be that it goes on without us, and no one notices the difference.