Can haunting be benevolent? That’s the question posed by Alice Sees Ghosts, the second novel from Bennington author, visual artist and translator Daisy Rockwell. Despite its Halloween-adjacent U.S. release date, the book is more comedy of manners than horror tale. But it does evoke an eerie sense that everything we do is haunted by the specters of our forebears.
The novel opens with three generations of one family living in a “huge, peculiar, decaying house in the woods of western Massachusetts.” Alice Bloodshaw clings to her beloved dying grandmother, Nanette, while trying to avoid her abrasive, alcoholic mother, Clare. While Nanette’s speech has been impaired by strokes, Alice recently began talking again after a “lengthy spell” of muteness brought on by the toxic mother-daughter dynamic.
Ronit Roy, the psychiatrist hired to treat Alice, instead fell in love and proposed to her. He’s naturally concerned when his fiancée tells him she recently met the ghost of her grandfather while rambling through the family manse. Grandfather, Alice believes, wants to send her a message. Ronit tries to distract her, fearing for her sanity — until he learns the ghost was pointing to a map of India, where Grandfather ran a business while alive. Real or not, the specter has given Ronit the perfect pretext for a trip home to Kolkata so Alice can meet his own family — and find out what the ghost meant.
After Nanette’s death, the couple set off, and the novel’s pace speeds up. Clues lead Ronit and Alice to a Himalayan cottage, where they make a discovery that precipitates a train of other revelations and, eventually, helps heal rifts in Alice’s strange and secretive family.
Rockwell clearly knows something about the weight of legacy. The granddaughter of artist Norman Rockwell, in 2012 she released a work called The Little Book of Terror — featuring painted portraits of terrorists — that inspired conservative commentator Glenn Beck’s website the Blaze to accuse her of not “following in her grandfather’s footsteps.” In a Seven Days interview at the time, the artist challenged that right-wing interpretation of her famous grandfather’s legacy, noting that some of his later works evoke the cultural turbulence of his era.
Rockwell is also a renowned Hindi-Urdu translator, winner of such honors as the International Booker Prize. The descriptions in Alice Sees Ghosts are full of authority and acumen, whether she’s writing about Indian street vendors, a grubby American diner or the elites of both cultures: Ronit’s loving, scholarly family and Alice’s repressed, deeply fractured one.
For Alice, legacy is a mixed blessing: She’s sole heir to the dregs of the family fortune, but the stuffy lifestyle of those who amassed it is foreign to her. With equal parts wit and bemusement, Rockwell chronicles the eccentricities of “New Englanders of patrician mien and crumbling pedigrees” — their horror of emotions, their response to all delicate questions with “sarcastic ripostes that tended to lead one ever further from the truth.”
Despite Alice’s unconventional upbringing by the unstable Clare, she remains a product of that patrician ethos, from her “impenetrable” affect to her knee-jerk dislike of modern conveniences such as the internet. Having “had very little exposure to people who were employed,” we learn, Alice is baffled whenever Ronit expresses reluctance to drop everything and chase her obsessions: “She had a hard time understanding things like work ethic and the responsibilities of a doctor.”
With tart asides like that, Rockwell keeps Alice Sees Ghosts from becoming as detached from reality as Alice herself is. Shifting third-person narration grounds the story, with tension and humor arising from the contrast between Alice’s whimsy and Ronit’s pragmatism. “In [Ronit’s] imagination,” Rockwell writes, “Alice spent much of her time wandering about the apartment, a novel held loosely in her hand, dreaming about her next obsession.”
Romantic as that may sound, both Ronit and the reader will learn that Alice’s oddness is a trauma response as much as a choice. In many ways, the pair are opposites, yet Ronit loves Alice for her icy remove, which reminds him of his childhood fixation on Olympian Dorothy Hamill, rather than despite it. His mission is not to fix his ethereal fiancée but simply to help her function. And the doggedness with which he supports her makes us root for their makeshift relationship, too.
The ancestral ghosts of gothic fiction may be harbingers of doom, but Rockwell’s ghosts are a refreshingly different breed.
Alice Sees Ghosts is perhaps a rarity in current literary fiction: It begins in a dark place and becomes progressively happier, indulging its characters’ foibles rather than tormenting them for their flaws. Alice is rewarded for her wild leaps of faith, her eagerness to believe in communication from beyond the grave, and so is Ronit for his willingness to give her fancies the benefit of the doubt. Step by step, discovery by discovery, the two of them transform a comically dysfunctional family unit into a thriving one in which artistic and spiritual affinities take precedence over biological kinship.
Some readers might object that Alice Sees Ghosts could use more material conflict — that it too speedily solves the problem of the angry and sometimes terrifying Clare (see excerpt), who menaces Alice and Ronit’s happiness. But the novel is such a pleasure to read, with its buoyant prose, entertaining twists and likably oddball characters, that this reader found its lightness of spirit to be well earned. The ancestral ghosts of gothic fiction may be harbingers of doom, visiting retribution on their descendants, but Rockwell’s ghosts are a refreshingly different breed — specters with a sincere desire to see the next generation figure things out.
This article appears in October 28 • 2026.
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