David Nickle: The Geisters

When Ann LeSage was a little girl, she had an invisible friend—a poltergeist, that spoke to her with flying knives and howling winds. She called it the Insect. And with a little professional help, she contained it. And the nightmare was over, at least for a time. But the nightmare never truly ended. As Ann grew from girl into young woman, the Insect grew with her. It became more than terrifying. It became a thing of murder. Now, as she embarks on a new life married to successful young lawyer, Michael Voors, Ann believes that she finally has the Insect under control. But there are others vying to take that control away from her. They may not know exactly what they’re dealing with, but they know they want it. They are the ’Geisters. And in pursuing their own perverse dream, they risk spawning the most terrible nightmare of all.

Review

“The story is a white-knuckler from page one, and Nickle is a master of luring you into thinking that the supernatural can be rationalized and systemized, only to reveal, time and again, that the orderly patterns we try to make of the irrational are figments of our imagination. I was off-balance and more than a little scared throughout.”

— Cory Doctorow, Boingboing.net

“Just finished David Nickle’s The ’Geisters…: brilliant, vicious, gothic-modern take on female monsters, aka poltergeists and the hubristic men who fetishize them. It is SO original and crazy, and SO well-written. GET IT.”

— Gemma Files, author of the Hexslinger trilogy

“The ’Geisters is filled with an interminable sense of threat, as though the words could turn on the reader at any moment, and they often do…. This is a book that buzzes in your ears, climbs your crawling skin with multiple barbed feet, feeling with exquisitely sensitive antennae for the next new and terrible revelation.”

— Natalie Zena Waschots, The National Post