" Hal is a mild-mannered IRS bureaucrat
who suspects that his wife is cheating with her younger, more virile coworker.
At a drunken dinner party, Hal volunteers to fly to Belize in search of Susan's
employer, T.—the protagonist of Lydia Millet's much-lauded novel How the Dead
Dream—who has vanished in a tropical jungle, initiating a darkly humorous
descent into strange and unpredictable terrain.
Salon raved that Millet's "writing is
always flawlessly beautiful, reaching for an experience that precedes language
itself." In Ghost Lights, she combines her characteristic wit and a sharp
eye for the weirdness that governs human (and nonhuman) interactions. With the
scathing satire and tender honesty of Sam Lipsyte and a dark, quirky, absurdist
style reminiscent of Joy Williams, Millet has created a comic, startling, and
surprisingly philosophical story about idealism and disillusionment, home and
not home, and the singular, heartbreaking devotion of parenthood.”
