Sadly, T.M. Wright was never destined for mass popularity. His fiction is too surreal, obtuse, challenging. Most readers prefer conventional storytelling and coherent plot-lines. Wright's writing is anything but typical.
I wrongly thought T.M. Wright was on the way to be one of the biggest names in the genre. He was getting a big push. I first heard of him when I saw a big, full-page advertisement for A Manhattan Ghost Story in Rod Serling's Twilight Zone Magazine. Wright and the novel were getting big praise, with quotes from other writers. Including the Midas Touch of a Stephen King blurb.
I bought a used paperback shortly after, which was how I almost always read books in those days. Within the pages of A Manhattan Ghost Story I found a totally unique type of writing.
At one point ghosts were residents of castles in Gothic novels, in small towns, in areas of wilderness. Fritz Lieber introduced revenants to urban cities in 1941 with his classic short story, "Smoke Ghost". It was still rare to see ghosts in a metropolis when Wright published A Manhattan Ghost Story in 1984.
Despite publicity attempts from Tor, A Manhattan Ghost Story wasn't particularly successful. I suppose it sold well enough for T. M. Wright to get several more books published, but he never become one of the big writers in the field. It's a sad shame.
There are a few of us, yes, who revere the work of T. M. Wright, but today his name carries little weight. Many modern collectors wouldn't bat an eye over a Wright book, but will get whiplash trying to grab a William W. Johnson piece of hackwork.
It's like how I recently saw a group of boneheads at the Facebook Books of Horror page sneering about Peter Straub, saying how terrible a writer he was. Writers like Straub, Campbell, and Wright are too smart for a large percentage of today's horror community.
Getting back to the book at hand, I've seen comparisons of A Manhattan Ghost Story to Shyalaman's The Sixth Sense. I see more similarities with Herk Harvey's surreal Carnival of Souls.
Instead of the protagonist being dead, it becomes apparent early on in A Manhattan Ghost Story that everyone he encounters in New York City is some kind of specter.
A photographer goes to the city to work on a new book. A friend is overseas and allows him to use his apartment. There he meets a mysterious woman and begins a torrid relationship. He begins to discover evidence that she was murdered by her ex. Others in the city exhibit bizarre behavior until everything he does or sees seems suspect.
The great thing about T. M. Wright's work is its accessibility. The language is plain, simple, and quite easy to read. The ideas within the sentences are harder to digest. Wright doesn't always offer clean and neat answers to the his own questions, making his fiction challenging.
T. M. Wright is a writer's writer. His work is like a finely constructed watch. It ticks and does its job, but only a professional can understand the mechanisms behind it.
Book after book, wild concept after wild concept, T. M. Wright forged a career of unprecedented work. By the two-thousands he was unfortunately relegated to the small press. He simply isn't for everyone.
It isn't all bad today. We have writers like Catriona Ward and Dan Chaon who challenge and entice readers with complex fiction and literate language. As for Mr. Wright, some of his work is available on Kindle, but a lot of it is out of print in any form. He's another great writer who helped forge modern horror, but lies forgotten in an overgrown generic graveyard.
Written by Mark Sieber
I wrongly thought T.M. Wright was on the way to be one of the biggest names in the genre. He was getting a big push. I first heard of him when I saw a big, full-page advertisement for A Manhattan Ghost Story in Rod Serling's Twilight Zone Magazine. Wright and the novel were getting big praise, with quotes from other writers. Including the Midas Touch of a Stephen King blurb.
I bought a used paperback shortly after, which was how I almost always read books in those days. Within the pages of A Manhattan Ghost Story I found a totally unique type of writing.At one point ghosts were residents of castles in Gothic novels, in small towns, in areas of wilderness. Fritz Lieber introduced revenants to urban cities in 1941 with his classic short story, "Smoke Ghost". It was still rare to see ghosts in a metropolis when Wright published A Manhattan Ghost Story in 1984.
Despite publicity attempts from Tor, A Manhattan Ghost Story wasn't particularly successful. I suppose it sold well enough for T. M. Wright to get several more books published, but he never become one of the big writers in the field. It's a sad shame.
There are a few of us, yes, who revere the work of T. M. Wright, but today his name carries little weight. Many modern collectors wouldn't bat an eye over a Wright book, but will get whiplash trying to grab a William W. Johnson piece of hackwork.
It's like how I recently saw a group of boneheads at the Facebook Books of Horror page sneering about Peter Straub, saying how terrible a writer he was. Writers like Straub, Campbell, and Wright are too smart for a large percentage of today's horror community.
Getting back to the book at hand, I've seen comparisons of A Manhattan Ghost Story to Shyalaman's The Sixth Sense. I see more similarities with Herk Harvey's surreal Carnival of Souls.
Instead of the protagonist being dead, it becomes apparent early on in A Manhattan Ghost Story that everyone he encounters in New York City is some kind of specter.
A photographer goes to the city to work on a new book. A friend is overseas and allows him to use his apartment. There he meets a mysterious woman and begins a torrid relationship. He begins to discover evidence that she was murdered by her ex. Others in the city exhibit bizarre behavior until everything he does or sees seems suspect.
The great thing about T. M. Wright's work is its accessibility. The language is plain, simple, and quite easy to read. The ideas within the sentences are harder to digest. Wright doesn't always offer clean and neat answers to the his own questions, making his fiction challenging.
T. M. Wright is a writer's writer. His work is like a finely constructed watch. It ticks and does its job, but only a professional can understand the mechanisms behind it.
Book after book, wild concept after wild concept, T. M. Wright forged a career of unprecedented work. By the two-thousands he was unfortunately relegated to the small press. He simply isn't for everyone.
It isn't all bad today. We have writers like Catriona Ward and Dan Chaon who challenge and entice readers with complex fiction and literate language. As for Mr. Wright, some of his work is available on Kindle, but a lot of it is out of print in any form. He's another great writer who helped forge modern horror, but lies forgotten in an overgrown generic graveyard.
Written by Mark Sieber
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