Sundress Reads: Review of Practice for Becoming a Ghost

Practice for Becoming a Ghost (Susquehanna University Press, 2024) is a collection of sixteen short stories from critic and author Patrick Thomas Henry. It is a twisting, surreal book about ghosts, fate, and the void; I knew immediately it was going to right up my alley. Henry is an alchemist mixing Murakami, Kafka, Freud, and Nietzsche with extreme poise. The result is a dynamic and multivocal explosion of sensation, a biting jouissance that melts into a lingering awe.

Practice for Becoming a Ghost is the literary equivalent of a wandering merchant trading in oddities and marvels, offering everything from psychosexual fever dreams to fairy tales and imagist flash fiction. In one story, a “painting automaton” powered by a windmill is tormented by small children and birds (Henry 59). In another, a young intern describes two nightmare roommates: one with a golden retriever tattoo on his chest that he treats like a real dog, the other a domineering heiress who demands rent in the form of stories about textures. My personal favorite, “Of the Throat,” is about a schoolteacher, haunted by a love interrupted, who wages her own war against fate. Naturally, fate is embodied by a daytime-television psychic and those little paper fortune tellers you’d make in grade school.

It is this range that makes Practice for Becoming a Ghost so difficult to pin down. It is a thousand-pronged, teeming, multivocal rat-king of a collection operating by the logic of dream. Try and grab a hold of it and watch as it reconfigures itself before your very eyes, furious and gnashing, all tooth and claw. In one story, a demented man barely clings to life, ashing cigarettes into fishtanks and letting dishes pile up in the sink, while his daughter berates her husband, downing gin and tonics and referring to him almost exclusively as “ass-butt” (Henry 18). At one point she throws a bronze statue at him. In another, this one only a few pages long, two brothers are regaled with tales of battlefield horror by a veteran who thinks they’re playing war (they are actually pretending to be Mario and Luigi). Years later, after a deployment to Kosovo, one describes what he saw to the other:

“He asked if I’d seen any action. I whispered to him: underneath a debris-shadowed sky, I had seen the red clip of bullets, like fireflies blinking a message throughout an eternal night, sparking from the muzzles of their firearms. Hollow-voiced, I told my brother of the leaning walls that crumbled, shed bricks like tears as we marched past.” (Henry 119)

Henry has an eye for the tragic and a vibrant, compelling imagination. These moments where his dream worlds veer into nightmare are enthralling in all their bitter irony. Fittingly, Practice for Becoming a Ghost, even when it isn’t veering into nightmare, is fascinated with “the deep:” sea monsters, the subterranean, cemeteries, and the unspoken. In “Of the Throat,” the unspoken (i.e., what is stuck in the throat) seems to literally hold the power to kill. The final story, “Him in the Gorse,” is a fairy tale set in 19^th-century Ireland involving a woman with terrifying premonitions and a poet who wishes to collect stories about faeries (who, in Irish folklore, are powerful illusionists). In prying a tale out of this young woman, the poet digs up a repressed past and sets in motion a chain of events that will forever alter the fate of both.

Interrogation of the depths is the thread that ties the collection together. Tellingly, collection begins with an epigraph from Hardboiled & Hard Luck by Banana Yoshimoto, which reads:

“That road I had been on didn’t lead anywhere, this trip would never end—it seemed to me as if next morning would never arrive. It occurred to me that this must be how it feels to be a ghost. Perhaps ghosts are trapped forever in a time like this, I mused.”

These two sentences voice the thread binding the collection together. Ghosts, and all other forms of earth-bound dead, are condemned to restless, solitary wandering. All ghosts are hungry, driven eternally to quench desire left unfulfilled in life. The ghost story is a nightmare of eternal alienation and unconsummated desire. The cyclical nature of desire and the hard kernel of alienation that cannot be resolved, if not part and parcel of “human nature,” at least present themselves as such and are universally felt by post-modern subjects. We are all hungry ghosts “practicing” for eternity, waiting for a dawn that never comes.

It is not just Practice for Becoming a Ghost that orbits this void; in truth, all art is libidinal. Unlike other modes, however, the surreal is uniquely suited to interrogate the relationship between the self, the unconscious, and the world. The surreal is always encountered violently, as extreme discordance between sense and thought. Like the analysis of a dream, the very act of making sense of the surreal brings to the surface what is repressed. What makes Practice for Becoming a Ghost unique is that it raises the question of eternal recurrence: would you repeat this life forever? It is with this Nietzschean flourish that Henry resolves the terror of the unconscious laid bare. “Of the Throat” ends on this note:

“The memento mori cease to arrive, but I redeploy them as decorations around the classroom. During recess, I watch as Wendy and the others gang around Enid. There are no fortune tellers. Whatever premonitions they may have contained, Enid has altered. This is a future unaccounted for in the medium of Sharpie on heavy stock paper.” (Henry 56)

The illumination of the unconscious and of the structures of global capital both call into question the notion of human agency. This realization threatens to destroy the very foundations of the world as we know it. The ghost story is still the story of our times, whether we want to admit it or not. Perhaps the intractability of this condition calls for a new understanding of the human condition. If we are all ghosts of ourselves, driven in ways we cannot understand, and condemned to repeat these same patterns forever, there is nothing left to do but embrace fate.

Practice for Becoming a Ghost is available from Susquehanna University Press

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Natalie Gardner is a trans writer hailing from Knoxville, Tennessee. She is currently pursuing a BA in English with a minor in philosophy from the University of Tennessee. She loves transgressive fiction, hiking, and schlocky, B-tier horror movies. When she isn’t working, you can find her haunting the coffee shops of Fort Sanders and DIY shows across East Tennessee. Her work in the field of linguistics can be found in Feedback Review in Second Language.