This is one of those ball of wool yarns with lots of separate unravels, each more annoying (but fun) than the preceding one. On the surface it’s a tale about a wannabe writer at an artist’s retreat orating to other creatives during a dinner party (all of whom are strangers) about the time she may have ruined a man’s life. But perhaps it’s also a story about the cursed relationship with uncaring or distant parents, and those consequences playing out over time. Or maybe it’s just a cut-and-dried ghost story where psychogeography and a possession take centre stage? The plot does get a bit silly in parts, but that adds to the fun. Like a lot of New Yorker stories, it’s long (8,882 words), multilayered and has a peculiar circularity in its execution. It might even be a gimmick, but I loved how unreliable the narrator was and how dismissive and nasty the guests became. I felt sorry for the male character, his face and body becoming ‘so viscerally pink, like underdone pork loin’ and he never got to finish that novel. Towards the end “the people at the [dinner] table yawned. They felt that the story was overlong, and unsatisfying.” A fun story.

First published in The New Yorker, June 23, 2014, and available to subscribers to read here