The Ghost Writer

Molly had flourished in graduate school and published many peer-reviewed articles deconstructing modern Irish poetry and fiction; she was especially fond of revealing the links between Yeats and experts in, and practitioners of, the occult. Despite her successes, once she defended her PhD to broad acclaim and began exploring the job market, her heart sank. Tenured positions were as rare as sapphires; she scrambled to find contract teaching and editing work, just to keep starvation at bay.

Eventually, she got lucrative work editing, revising and in many cases, ghost writing essays, articles and short stories for various, exhausted graduate students and a few, lazy and affluent professors. She exceled at parroting the works of others in terms of both style and substance. ChatGPT could do the same sort of thing, of course, but the results generally failed the sniff test: AI, in its current form, seemed to Molly to be little more than an incredibly efficient fraud.

She, on the other hand, could study an author’s work and quickly produce fresh, lengthy texts in just the same voice. Any ethical qualms she experienced while churning out material were squashed by her capacity not just to muster rent and feed herself, but also to keep the wolf from the door of her large and impoverished family.

One night, as she transcribed lines from Coleridge’s “Frost at Midnight” into an essay that was short of citations, she was astonished to see the ghost of Coleridge himself appear before her! The friendly phantom explained to Molly that she could conjure great poets and warriors of history by echoing the texts they had created or appeared in, and that they would help her to right wrongs!

Thus, Molly became The Ghost Writer, and the rewriting of her world, and ours, began…