Max Lury | No Ghosts | Weird Fiction | Ep. 22

Max Lury reads from No Ghosts, his unsettling debut novel about grief, friendship in the modern era of technology, and (just maybe) the afterlife. In his passage, a woman is anonymously emailed a strange, possibly AI-generated video of her missing best friend, or something close to her. Max chats with Jon and Cory about:

• The trickiness of writing about a character watching a video
• The creepypasta story that has stuck with him since he was a teenager, and the elements that might have seeped into his novel
• His first stab at the idea that became No Ghosts: a George Saunders–inspired short story about a bouncer who joins a séance community
• Not shying away from texting and the outsized role smartphones play in our modern lives
• Watching AI technology catch up to his fiction over the five years he spent writing the book
• Typing out Don DeLillo passages in his own font and printing them out to demystify them

Max’s passage from No Ghosts, available from Peninsula Press:

There were two files, which took less than a minute to download. In that time she tried to work out who might have sent them. They’d been sent the day of Annie’s memorial, which could mean something, although she wasn’t sure what. It could be spam, too. There were bots that could scrape for your name, find your details: this kind of thing wasn’t uncommon. A dozen reasons for it, which she was sure would come to light when the download was finished. The small circle became one colour. Harlow opened the first file with VLC media player, and clicked play.

The film was shot from just inside a hallway, an open door framing a woman alone in a room. Harlow paused it and exhaled. She said, fuck, out loud.

The woman on the screen looked like Annie. Although, not exactly. The image had her red hair, the same eye bags, the same freckles which clumped to make formless blotches – but it was still somehow an approximation. Compiled from disparate elements. It was how Annie’s face would look if she wore it as a mask.

Harlow closed her eyes for a moment and pressed the tips of her fingers against her eyelids. She took a deep breath and opened her eyes. It was still Annie. At least, a version of her. Almost her.

Harlow pressed play again.

The woman sat alone on a sofa, in a wooden cabin. There was a fur throw under her and the window behind was whited out. She folded small clothes, presumably a child’s, in her lap, rocking ever so slightly as she did so. Her hands were half-rendered, only meant to be visible in motion. The figure stopped what she was doing, her face going slack, and her fingers tapped one by one against her thumb.

She looked up and as she did, the scene ended.

It cut and started again. The shot was in the same position, peering into the same room. Harlow took a closer look, trying to see if the woman really was Annie, or if she was just projecting. It was the same figure again: red hair; that big, ungainly mouth. But this time the woman on screen seemed distressed, her lips were moving as if she was saying a word or a name over and over, running her hands through her hair, eyes wide, something upsetting to it, that same mad panic Harlow had seen so many times with Annie in hospital waiting rooms and on bedroom floors.

But it was, Harlow felt, undeniably Annie. Alone, and afraid. Annie, or almost-Annie, looked up. Her eyes came to rest above the camera, widening just a fraction in what could have been recognition or panic. There was no way of telling.

In the last scene the cabin was empty, and the throw was gone. The window had been smashed but there were no shards of glass on the floor. Something like a shadow fell across the shot, coming from the hallway behind, and then the video was over.