George Saunders returns to a world full of ghosts

In “Vigil,” spirits consider the many sins of a dying industrialist.

By Ron Charles

The shades are gathering again for George Saunders.

In 2017, when the celebrated short-story writer published his first novel, “Lincoln in the Bardo,” ghosts and grievers swarmed the Oak Hill Cemetery in Georgetown, where President Abraham Lincoln’s 11-year-old son, Willie, was laid to rest. That story of spirits hovering in the space between life and death won a heavenly host of accolades — and the Booker Prize. Its popular success was even more extraordinary given that “Lincoln in the Bardo” offered no traditional narrative, just a curated series of quotations from letters, diaries and newspaper articles, interlaced with raucous commentary from restless corpses.

At the time, it seemed sui generis, but Saunders’s second novel suggests that ghost stories are his new genus. Read the full review at the Washington Post.