WATCHING ME, WATCHING YOU by Fay Weldon

“Many houses contain ghosts. (It would be strange if they didn’t.)”

This story – constituted by many gapped paragraphs with much wall to wall, edge to edge dialogue – spanning 1965 to 1980 in a city’s suburbs and the lives that link a couple of those houses and also the ghost that journeys between them carrying their fates as burdens and as catalyst or cause-and-effect or effect-and-cause upon or by humans who live or grow there, or all of these things — their cursed endings one of which ignited the ghost, their later marital flings or permanent disloyalties, the consequent births of more humans as potential people with subsequent growth into such people, and the necessity of at least one of them to write something worthwhile that also pays money. To keep the ghost from the door. The author now, in our own real-time, is all of those things, even this story’s gestalt as ghost or ghost as gestalt?

RIP Fay Weldon

This review’s happenstance anthology context today —

Twentieth Century Ghost Stories