-
Your next favorite book
is waiting.
Summary | Excerpt | Reviews | Beyond the book | Read-Alikes | Genres & Themes | Author Bio
Stories
by Kim Samek
Book Reviewed by:Twelve women confront the mounting existential terrors of modernity—climate change, unbridled capitalism and greed, an entertainment industry that will go to surreal lengths to stay relevant—in this debut story collection set in a slightly off-kilter version of reality.
A woman's limbs disappear into "the cloud" during wildfire-induced power outages. A lonely DoorDasher accidentally becomes the star of someone else's reality show, forced to resolve her fraught relationship with her immigrant mother for the narrative. Succumbing to a widely denied pandemic, a gymnastics coach must carry her heart around in a Mason jar, using her disability to become an influencer. Two chronically single, chronically ill people become soulmates, only to discover their meeting was algorithmically orchestrated by ad tech. Other dramas unfold as icebergs melt and island-sized trash heaps burn.
Threaded with sharp social commentary, these stories question the engineering of human connection through technology, social media, and reality television. Warm, endlessly strange, and filled with dark yet hopeful humor, I Am the Ghost Here casts familiar crises of contemporary life in a wholly unique light, offering a pathway towards our shared humanity even as reality comes crumbling down.
I Am the Ghost Here
It is not until my older brother is thirty-¬three that I learn he's controlled by a puppeteer. The truth comes out after a family emergency, when Jeff is unable to summon the puppeteer on short notice and must appear as himself for the first time. I don't immediately recognize my brother as he hurries through the automatic doors of the hospital. He's usually an alpha male, a tech founder who takes big strides and has a deep, booming voice, but this man is nervous, twitchy, weird.
Normally my brother greets me with a compliment about my appearance. "Looking good, SunnyD," he'd say. "Really fit. You've made some gains?" He nicknamed me for the drink I chugged after judo practice as a kid. I am no longer a jock, but the nickname stuck. This man doesn't use my nickname. He doesn't greet me at all. He slinks up to me with his head down, like I am unfamiliar, except he is the one who is unfamiliar.
"Is Dad okay?" he asks, sitting down next to me not far from the triage ...
Samek sets up unusual situations with knock-out first lines. The title story opens, "It is not until my older brother is thirty-three that I learn he's controlled by a puppeteer." "Egg Mother" has an equally startling beginning: "At thirty-six I turn into a scrambled egg. It happens a few months after I give birth." A therapist helps the narrator realize that she has never come to terms with the death of her mother from cancer more than 20 years ago. Many of the protagonists are mixed-race, like Samek, who is half-Thai. Personal health and climate concerns complicate the question of parenthood in some of the most resonant stories...continued
Full Review
(784 words)
(Reviewed by Rebecca Foster).
Charles Yu, author of Interior Chinatown
Like a season of Black Mirror but less bleak and more melancholy, each story in this collection offers a door into an inventive new world, strange and familiar at the same time. Every page, every line offers possibility, surprise, humor, or heartbreak... . An exciting new voice. Ed Park, Pulitzer Prize finalist and author of Same Bed, Different Dreams
Beguiling and funny and desperately, delicately human...I found these stories as irresistible as a pack of time-traveling mints. Kate Folk, author of Sky Daddy
I adored this collection of surreal stories, which feel both of-the-moment and timeless. Bizarre, very funny, and emotionally authentic, these stories pulse with pathos and surprising insights into what it feels like to be human...A vital addition to the canon of weird fiction.In Kim Samek's short story collection I Am the Ghost Here, several stories fall into the realm of "body horror." The phrase refers to books or movies featuring the transformation or mutilation of the human body. The term was coined by Philip Brophy in a 1983 article on horror films. Although the concept might seem unique to cinema, it can in fact be traced back in literature to early 19th-century Gothic tropes (think Mary Shelley's Frankenstein), Franz Kafka's The Metamorphosis, through to today's horror and science fiction authors.
Body horror is so frightening because the source of dread is within the individual, rather than external, and thus inescapable. It reminds us that our bodies are never fully under our own control. Some ...
If you liked I Am the Ghost Here, try these:
by Ed Park
Published 2026
A deadpan, wildly imaginative collection of stories that slices clean through the mundanity and absurdity of modern life, from the author of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize–winner and Pulitzer Prize finalist Same Bed Different Dreams.
by Olga Tokarczuk
Published 2025
The Nobelist's latest masterwork, set in a sanitarium on the eve of World War I, probes the horrors that lie beneath our most hallowed ideas.
There Is a Rio Grande in Heaven
by Ruben Reyes
Published 2025
An electrifying debut story collection about Central American identity that spans past, present, and future worlds to reveal what happens when your life is no longer your own.
It is always darkest just before the day dawneth
Click Here to find out who said this, as well as discovering other famous literary quotes!
Can you name the title?
Test your book knowledge with our daily trivia challenge!
