I of the Needle

In a ghost story, the appearance of the phrase “common-law partner” will be uncanny: it will sound like a dry, bureaucratic irrelevancy intervening from a third world, one of neither flesh, nor spirit, but dull, legal fact. It will stand out and demand to be explained. And maybe it can be understood as a stylistic joke, if the author seems up to that sort of thing, say if his ghost story has been playing around with petty humiliations, with recurring numbers and names, with absurd plotting, and with the easiness and silliness of the fable and the fairytale.