For readers unfamiliar with the term creepypasta, allow me to offer an example: THERE IS A WINDOW IN YOUR BEDROOM THAT ONLY APPEARS WHEN YOU’RE ASLEEP. DON’T TRY TO OPEN IT.
Creepypasta is a genre of horror fiction native to the internet. Often written under pseudonyms, they’re stories engineered for maximum shares and scares, capitalising on the folkloric, liminal undercurrents of the social web.
No Ghosts, an ambitious debut novel by Max Lury, is a rigorous new exploration of the creepypasta aesthetic. Its 300-plus pages allude to genre codifiers such as The Backrooms and The Dream Man, as well the native habitats that spawned them: Reddit, 4chan and Tumblr.
The story opens at a memorial service in London where friends Harlow and Kieran reunite to mourn Annie, the missing member of their trio. Annie is presumed dead, but when Harlow receives an email containing obscure video footage of her, she suspects her former employer, an AI company, might be involved. The plot is a two-hander: Harlow moves to the company’s headquarters in Scotland to investigate, and Kieran falls in with a group of occultists troubleshooting a newly faulty connection to the afterlife.
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The novel understands the faultiness of digital technologies in the face of grief, using eerie motifs to focus on what cannot be captured, stored and queried. In this way, No Ghosts argues for the ineffability of intimacy: when Harlow scrolls through old conversations with Annie, she finds herself drawn towards “the gaps between messages, when texts just said are u outside, or, there in 15”.
The novel works best when demonstrating the warped state of contemporary human-computer relations. Before entering Kensal Green cemetery, a blank-faced cult member with a clipboard asks Kieran his name and reason for visiting; when he asks why, she explains that she is “just collecting data”. Here, Lury is on to something: in the 21st century, life does not imitate art – it imitates user experience design.
Ultimately, the problem with No Ghosts is that its protagonists are too translucent. Harlow and Kieran lack the psychological density the plot requires. The characters are so emotionally evacuated that the book’s third act appears uninterested in answering the questions posed in its first – unless, of course, it prefers to leave them open for creepypastas to come.
Kristen Malone Poli is a PhD candidate in literary practice at Trinity College Dublin
