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Ghosts, wraiths, specters. Poltergeists, phantoms, shades. They manifest in many shapes and dispositions in our lives and the literatures of all cultures. From the Egyptian to the Tibetan Book of the Dead, from the Homeric epics to Shakespeare’s King Hamlet, from the Victorian ghosts of Sheridan Le Fanu, Violet Hunt, and M. R. James to Amos Tutuola’s My Life in the Bush of Ghosts, from the ethereal creatures of Poe to the startlingly “realistic” ghosts of Henry James and Edith Wharton, phantasmagoric beings mingle with the living. Nature itself may be “haunted”—an unknowable presence hostile to human intrusion, as in Algernon Blackwood’s classic “The Willows.” Sometimes a ghostly haunting is metaphoric; often it is literal. The Japanese jorōgumo ghost appears as a beautiful maiden but is a lethal spider monster. Buddhism’s hungry ghosts have enormous stomachs and tiny mouths that represent how worldly desires blocked their path to nirvana.

Being a ghost is being stuck in a limbo between vitality and finality. Ghosts are the unliving-living, the not-quite-dead deceased. Stubborn survivors, they are sometimes caught by surprise, traumatized by violence in the midstream of their lives with much left undone, unsaid, or vengeance to wreak upon the living. Other times they cling to their lives with such intensity that their spirits don’t believe they’ve been torn from a familiar earthly place: a childhood house, a forest glade, a hospital. But however the living are unable to “rest in peace,” revenants are left to wander in search of what was lost when they passed away—usually their very selves.

In Revenants, Joyce Carol Oates and Bradford Morrow will bring together a wide array of writers to explore this venerable theme, including Margaret Atwood, Carmen Maria Machado, Ben Okri, Paul Tremblay, Stephen Graham Jones, Valerie Martin, Jonathan Carroll, Reggie Oliver, James Morrow, Can Xue, Brian Evenson, Paul Muldoon, and the editors themselves, with original cover art by Laurel Hausler.