J.D Oswald’s atmospheric coming-of-age novel Broken Ghosts provides a haunting exploration of the everlasting impacts left behind in the intersection between humanity and the supernatural. Set in the foggy witchiness of rural Wales – where twelve-year-old Phoebe is sent to live with an eccentric and distant aunt and uncle following shattering personal tragedies – Broken Ghosts is the sprawling, untethered collision of folklore, history, drama, mystery, and the fundamental human forces that tie together these initially unconnected threads of life across the decades.
Densely descriptive and with a non-linear narrative style spanning forty years and changing between the two, Oswald’s novel is an impressively handled and far-reaching creation that allows the stories surrounding Phoebe and the buried mysteries of the tiny Welsh village she is moved to. Flitting between the present day and Phoebe’s arrival in 1985, Oswald’s narrative allows these tenuous and mysterious links to wind themselves around the action of its story and skilfully blurs the lines between the times in the same way the events of his novel do. Initially dark and depressing, with a wintry and obscured narrative direction, Broken Ghosts sets itself up immediately to deal with the fundamental darkness of death and isolation in the present day, and with long-buried murder mysteries and strange implacable acquaintances in the past. Without ever expressing too explicitly the directions and discoveries that Phoebe will follow, the novel becomes a meandering, open space in which Oswald explores the ideas that nothing is ever truly lost or forgotten – it sinks into ancient land and slumbers there until someone comes along to uncover it.
This intrinsic melancholy is highly atmospheric – Phoebe spends an entire wet summer roaming the fields and forests, avoiding the strange villagers she encounters at the river, learning the deep and dark lore of this old land, and devouring a series of romance novels by a mysterious author nobody seems to know anything about. These mysteries – some dark, some less so – weave into one overarching feeling of delicious strangeness and foggy misunderstanding – highly enjoyable for its deep atmosphere and gripping, sprawling histories. Phoebe’s eccentric aunt is comedically odd, the villager’s issues with the teenage goth telling stories of the ghosts in the forests seem realistically spooky, the aging rockstar with the dark backstory living in a house that is falling down in the forest is a highly original inclusion. Despite its density and stately pace, Broken Ghosts remains entertaining, questioning and searching – it comes to feel as though a reader actually has spent an entire strange and haunted summer with Phoebe and her implacable forest friendships. The otherworldliness and full embrace of the dark histories of the land is woven into each character, each scene – ghost stories told over dinner, in the pub, at the river.
The novel, however, isn’t a ghost story in the traditional sense – there are no real spooks here, no jumpscares or gore. Oswald allows simple human nature to fuel the novel’s supernaturality – the people’s connection to the land and to each other, the acceptance of secrets and the unreal, the inexplicable strangeness and damage of the people that Phoebe comes into contact with. The supernatural is no evil entity – it is a connection to a deeply human and damaged past, a way to heal around the gaping wounds of the present. Broken Ghosts is a deeply and intentionally strange novel, simultaneously creepy and yet undeniably cosy, with an almost classical or vintage construction of an incongruous protagonist travelling around strange locations, learning the land’s history, and fighting to connect it to the strangeness and difficulties of current existence. Phoebe blossoms over the course of the novel with several quintessential teenage high-dramas, with a satisfying tying up of the many strands of plot by the end – painting a melancholically beautiful and thought provokingly difficult picture of the full facets of human darkness and suffering, as well as the beacons of light that can be found in even the gloomiest corners so long as you look for them. Generational trauma, small mundane magic, and the majesty of nature inform and showcase this fundamental idea that the past never sleeps, and the land never quite lets go.
BROKEN GHOSTS is released on September 12th by Wildfire
