BookBrowse Reviews I Am the Ghost Here by Kim Samek

BookBrowse:

In Kim Samek's speculative short stories, technology and environmental collapse are twin threats for women also trying to cope with loss and health issues.

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Television producer Kim Samek's inventive debut short story collection recalls the work of Ed Park and George Saunders with its focus on the mixed blessing of technology. The protagonists of I Am the Ghost Here are dealing with grief or new motherhood, often while also struggling with their health. In a time of climate breakdown, it's disorienting to feel they can no longer rely on nature—or on their own bodies. In the search for purpose, they take comfort in the past or try to engineer a brighter future.

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." For over a decade, Jeff has employed Michelle to script his actions. When Jeff disappears—leaving behind a five-year-old son, Danny—the narrator becomes a fiercely supportive aunt. Danny rides his academic success all the way to Stanford, where he designs a virtual reality program that allows people to relive favorite memories. The narrator uses it to spend time with Jeff again, and a surprise ending reveals how he's still part of their family life.

"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. She decides to stage a funeral ceremony for her mother—as well as her younger self—in a cemetery. However, the ritual doesn't restore her human form. Stark messages emerge: loss is permanent, and even the ostensibly positive transformation of motherhood is in doubt.

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. For instance, the narrator of "Return" wants to use a time travel app so she can go back and be more present for her son; Covid and lupus limited her energy during his childhood. But the plan backfires when it repeatedly sends her to a dystopian future instead. The narrator of "The Cloud" is distressed that she can't give her daughter, Ondine, a normal childhood in a time of worsening heatwaves.

Technology bridges reality and made-up worlds here. In "Sven," D finds an earpiece on a park bench. The man speaking through it is a TV producer who asks her to join a new reality show. She agrees, and her food delivery job and visits to her mother become the stuff of a falsified plotline—her mother's house is a set, and when the show premieres she is taken aback by a fabricated scene. "The MILF Hotel," too, is about a reality TV show. This one lures widows into giving up their youth in exchange for fresh love with younger men. Elsewhere, a couple questions the validity of their relationship when they realize an algorithm brought them together, and an apparently innocuous robot vacuum records footage 24/7.

Environmental degradation is an underlying fear for Samek's characters. Nit is a landfill firefighter who faces the risks of toxic fumes and unsafe footing in "Trash Heap Hero." In "Everything Disappears When You're Having Fun," a TV producer's magical chair transports whoever sits in it to a frontline of climate crisis: a melting Greenland iceberg or the plastic-polluted Pacific. Thuy and Neil bond over a shared love of eating plastic in "The Garbage Patch." In a satire on the biblical myth of Jonah, Thuy gets swallowed by a whale.

The book also shades into body horror (see Beyond the Book) with several stories of women literally losing parts of themselves. Besides the protagonist of "Egg Mother," there's the narrator of "The Cloud," whose arm, leg, and lips disappear one by one during Southern California power cuts. In "The Sharpest Knife," a pandemic damages organs so severely that they have to be removed and stored externally. The main character is a gymnastics coach who has to carry her heart around in a mason jar and becomes a motivational influencer.

Although I enjoyed this gently surreal collection, I found some of its dozen stories redundant. I wasn't sure we needed two takes on reality television, two instances of robot control, two stories about trash accumulations, and so on. Some might experience this as cohesion across the book, but to me it felt like rehashing the same themes, usually less successfully the second time around. I might have preferred fewer, longer stories. All the same, they are well crafted, with satisfying twist or full-circle endings and rich themes of mother–daughter interactions, parenting, environmental anxiety, and unresolved grief. I'll be looking forward to Samek's next work.

This review first ran in the April 22, 2026 issue of BookBrowse Recommends.