Book review: “The Warm Hands of Ghosts”, Katherine Arden | Books | Seven Days

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• Decency
• The warm hands of the spirits by Katherine Arden, Del Rey Books, 327 pages. $28.99. | Katherine Arden

If you put your finger anywhere on the wheel of time, you will find an era when people thought the world was ending. No matter what miracles we devise to make our lives more fulfilling, connected, or long-lasting, humanity’s deep-rooted fear of impending doom overshadows them all. And nothing makes us foretell the end like war.

In Vermont’s spooky novel by author Katherine Arden The warm hands of the spiritsThe Great War rages on the European mainland. The chaotic fighting on the Western Front reaches its climax at the end of 1917, when soldiers on both sides die alone in trenches, shell craters and mud fields. Those who survive are hardly lucky. Post-traumatic stress disorder is widespread, although it has no common name. The world is falling apart.

Combat nurse Laura Iven, who was honorably discharged after a serious leg injury and sent home to Halifax, Nova Scotia, is now the only survivor of her family. Her parents were recently killed in a shipping tragedy in the harbor of her hometown when a French cargo ship, the SS Mont Blanccollided with a Norwegian freighter, causing a massive explosion that incinerated surrounding houses. And her younger brother Freddie, who was serving in Belgium, was pronounced dead.

But there’s something wrong with the news of Freddie’s death. When a soldier dies overseas, one military ID stays with the body while the other is sent to the surviving relatives back home. Both of Freddie’s IDs arrived with his personal belongings.

Laura lives with three elderly ladies, the Parkeys, who conduct dubious séances. While the widow Penelope “Pim” Shaw desperately tries to contact her missing son, a soldier, Laura receives a message from her Ouija board: Freddie is alive.

Laura is a skeptic and a pragmatist. She doesn’t believe her brother survived, or maybe she just doesn’t want to believe it. But she believes there’s more to the story than she’s been told, and so she heads back into the fray – not to find Freddie, but to find out what happened to him, she stresses.

On a whim, Pim joins Laura and uses her connection to Mary Borden, a formidable nurse with the Voluntary Aid Detachment, to help them return to the front. As the three women travel from Halifax to London on the continent, Laura follows clues that lead her to her brother.

In a parallel narrative set several months earlier, Freddie is alive but in trouble. He is clinging to a pitch-black bunker destroyed by a grenade. Among the piles of bodies that Freddie can only feel and smell is a badly injured German soldier, Hans Winter, who speaks excellent English. Although the men are sworn enemies, they work together to free themselves.

Dazed, the unexpected allies traverse battlefields and ruined villages, desperately searching for safety. But whichever side they find themselves on, one of them will be captured and likely executed.

At various points in their journey, both Freddie and Laura meet a mysterious, violin-playing fellow named Faland. He is a sort of hotelier with a mischievous, otherworldly aura, and offers weary travelers refuge and plenty of wine in his shabby-chic lodge, though he apparently doesn’t charge for it. Many people know him, but his whereabouts remain strangely secret.

As Laura searches for her brother and Freddie becomes involved with Faland, both are confronted with the darkness of their lives. Laura is haunted by the day her parents died, while Freddie thinks about the horrors he saw – and committed – before and after his encounter with Winter.

Arden’s ghosts are often figurative and sometimes perhaps real. They can exist in both states simultaneously. She uses the hellscape of World War I to summon demons and devils from history, myth and the depths of the human psyche.

The warm hands of the spirits is Arden’s first standalone novel. She previously wrote a horror tetralogy for middle school Small squares and that Winter night historical fantasy trilogy – for which she used her Russian degree from Middlebury College.

An emotional language seeps from the pages of Ghosts like the viscous fluids that flood the trenches and seep from bedridden soldiers. The textures, smells and unspeakable horrors come in relentless waves, like one Laura witnesses:

They had wrapped a dead man in a sheet and nurses were preparing to lift him up. A nurse rushed forward and shouted: “No, wait, be careful” … But they had lifted him up too quickly and his broken body just slipped apart …

Laura and Freddie are wonderfully drawn. Laura is sharp, both intellectually and behaviorally. She smokes and drinks a lot, with no regard for her own health and appearance. She stands up for herself and her decisions, even if she hides her feelings.

Freddie was never meant for war. A poet and painter, he would have died if it weren’t for Winter, a handsome, stoic man with whom Freddie forms an unbreakable bond. War often creates a strong bond between soldiers, but the connection between Freddie and Winter is much deeper.

The novel’s minor characters, some of whom are fictional and others based on real people, are equally vivid. The Parkeys are reminiscent of the ominous trio of witches in William Shakespeare’s Macbeth. Pim is cheerful and optimistic. Arden portrays Mary Borden as imperious and matter-of-fact. And Faland, with his mismatched eyes, checkered suit and the transcendent melodies emanating from his instrument, transforms from a Puck-like goblin into something intoxicating and dangerous.

Arden balances history with fantasy, never straying too far in either direction. Her focus is on her characters, their journeys, and how their circumstances—both mundane and magical—influence their choices. She paints the context carefully, showing how there were numerous portents of doom even before the war broke out. For Laura’s mother, Halley’s Comet, which shot through the sky in 1910, was a sign of the end times. Laura’s father was haunted by the experience of seeing the wreckage of the TitanicAnd the rapid advances in technology, such as moving pictures and flying machines, created a disturbing sense of rapid acceleration, even as it excited young men like Freddie.

Arden’s precision and imagination are reminiscent of the stirring masterpiece of British author Susanna Clarke Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrella magical story set against the backdrop of the Napoleonic Wars. The warm hands of the spirits suggests that ghosts are all around us, even if they cling to some more than others. But these ghosts may not be as scary as they seem. They might give us hope by showing us who we are, who we don’t want to be, and why the difference matters.

Out of The warm hands of the spirits

The floor creaked. A silence fell like a hand over Blackthorn House, and in the silence, almost imperceptibly, the planchette crept onto Yes. Laura hadn’t sensed they were tampering with it, but that wasn’t surprising. The Parkeys were professionals. Mrs. Shaw had turned as white as a sheet.

“Who is here?” asked Agatha.

JIM

“Jimmy!” cried Mrs. Shaw. “Jimmy! Where are you? Are you – are you dead, darling?” She had begun to tremble. Laura felt it through the table.

The planchette drifted to Yes. Then it continued. LIST, said the planchette. Mrs. Shaw’s eyes were fixed on the moving arrow.

“Listen,” gasped Lucretia. “But listen to what?” The world outside was completely silent.

BEWR, said the planchette.

“Be careful?” Clotilde repeated sharply.

Mrs. Shaw said, “No, but – Jimmy? Darling? Are you all right?”

BWR MSIC MROR, said the planchette. ER.

This was strange even to the Parkeys. MROR? Mirror? The remains of Laura’s brain made her think vaguely of the Lady of Shalott, Freddie reciting the lines of Tennyson while she pored over an anatomy textbook: the mirror shattered from side to side, “The curse is upon me,” cried…

“No, but -” Now Mrs. Shaw searched the air with panicked eyes. “Jimmy? Is that really you?”

DEAD, said the Ouija board. BUT HE’S ALIVE.

“Who is alive?” asked Clotilde.

FRED, said the planchette. FREDI FRED FR FIN FIND.

And if anything else happened, Laura didn’t see it because she pulled her chair, which was standing awkwardly on the carpet, back, turned away and left the room.