Book review: We Are All Ghosts In The Forest by Lorraine Wilson

“She returned with the boy ten days before the rains. The boy was hardly to blame but still, first came the stranger and then came the rains.”

Thus starts Lorraine Wilson’s We Are All Ghosts In The Forest, a post-apocalyptic novel set in a small village somewhere in Eastern Europe, in an unspecified amount of time after the Crash, when the internet escaped its bounds in a paroxysm of entropy.

The world is now inhabited by digital ghosts. Fragments of the internet that roam the world, playing their stories in a loop. If you aren’t careful, they can infect you, though like any virus, some ghosts are more infectious than others. Weak ones are harmless, or ones with little emotion in them. Data, maps, news reports, shopping websites, things like that. The occasional story ghost can be a problem if you happen to know the story. But the ones connected to destructive emotions are the riskiest, if your state of mind resonates with them well enough, they can… upload themselves into you.

You may think this is some sort of Mad Max-esque world, but it isn’t. It’s a smaller world, a simpler world. A world that isn’t ruled by money, but by trade. A loaf of bread for some herbs to ward off ghosts, perhaps.

You may think this is a post-apocalyptic story, and in some ways it is. But more than that, it is a layered story that brings up a number of themes to consider and reflect on.

The Internet and capitalism

It is no secret that in just 30 years, the internet has changed the world we live in. When it was first released to the public in 1993, the internet collapsed time and distance — emails were delivered immediately, you could chat with a stranger in a different continent in real time, you could find people who enjoyed the same hobbies as you did in all parts of the globe.

Then came social media, with a site called SixDegrees that launched in 1997, but it wasn’t until Facebook burst upon the scene in the early 2000s that social media and internet addiction slowly became a thing. Data shows that we’ve gone from spending 90 minutes a day on social media in 2012 to over 2.5 hours in 2023. And this is just social media — it doesn’t include the time we spend on emails, reading articles, online shopping, searching for information, and all of the other daily tasks for which we rely on the internet.

Which begs the question: if the Internet crashes, escapes its bounds, what goes with it?

It’s difficult to fathom, really. The world as we know it today will…collapse. Interesting, isn’t it, that in just 30 years, it’s almost impossible to imagine the world without the internet?

No wonder then, that at the start of the Crash, people still clung to their dead phones and dead laptops and books with all their tempting hollow spaces; before people learned that digital ghosts could infect a human.

Digital infection broke the body apart. Turned every neuron into nothing but electrical charge as the ghost converted the flesh to binary code and pixels. Sometimes it took days, sometimes hours.

This sentence right here, for some reason, felt so very resonant with the way we are leading our lives today, surrounded by binary code and pixels. Our bodies may not be breaking apart, but there is no denying that it is having an impact on us, this disconnection from nature, from making and doing things by hand.

And then there’s capitalism. It’s not an overt theme, just something that snagged at me while I was reading. The currency in this post-digital/internet world wasn’t money. Sure, some people had rubles to pay, but most of the payment was made in the form of trade. When you think about it, almost everyone has something to barter — if not bread from their table or wheat or vegetables from their fields, a skill they can exchange for something else they need.

While I’m not romanticizing barter, it did make me wonder: how much can one person consume? The sheer abundance of things that most of us have in our homes. How much of it do we really need? How could we simplify? How could we escape the capitalistic diktat to earn more to buy more to gain…what? Prestige? Social standing? A better experience? An upgrade of some sort?

Something to think about, for sure.

Patriarchy and a return to nature

Again, there’s no direct reference to patriarchy, but it’s there. I see it in the delightfully witchy current running through this book. Except that it’s not the way witches are portrayed in most books — there are no spells and incantations, no hexing or banishing, no crystals and potions, no altars, no Gods or Goddesses to pray to. In other words, none of the popular culture associations with witches and witchcraft.

But if you know what witches really were, before the church and patriarchy painted them as women with warts who bring down pestilence and disease, or the aesthetic TikTok witch became a trend to be co-opted by capitalism, you’ll immediately see just how witchy this book really is.

Because witches? They were simply the women who recognized the herbs and plants. They knew the ones that could heal and the ones that could do ill. They recognized the cycles of nature and the seasons. They could see the patterns and divine the future, a skill that goes back centuries, much before the church was born, much before the men decided it was a tool of the devil and burnt the witches because they were afraid of women with power.

But in this post-internet world, when there are no modern medicines, it is the witches who will heal the world.

Katerina, one of the main protagonists of this novel, learnt how to harvest plants, distill them and brew teas and tinctures, make salves and creams from her grandmother. She learnt how to scry using her grandmother’s scrying bowl talk and to the bees and stave off the wolves. In the end, it was the strega (witch) who found the cure for the digital infection that was sweeping through the region.

It makes you wonder, doesn’t it? Just how much of the old knowledge of plants and nature has been lost. Modern medicine is a miracle, there’s no denying that. But one must wonder: couldn’t both exist at the same time?

The insidious nature of guilt

Another thread running through this book is guilt, and the ways in which it can shape us, the lies it can make us believe.

Katerina is carrying her own guilt, her own failings — her inability to save her sister, Nikita. That singular event dodges her every move, colors all of her decisions, distorts her perspective of herself.

No amount of guilt or grief could undo your failures, and knowing you were broken did not mean you were any easier to fix. It did not mean you could be trusted with precious things. Sometimes it was safer to simply stay broken.

Guilt is made worse by rejection, which leads us to the other big theme woven through this novel.

Belonging and otherness

The distrust of the ‘other’, of strangers, is hinted at in the opening sentence of the novel — the stranger in whose wake came the rain.

It’s woven into the ghosts, who trail humans, inhabit deserted houses looking to get into the wiring only to set the house on fire, infecting humans, all in attempt to find home.

That’s all the ghosts were doing. Looking for home. It was just that the human body was not meant to contain so many broken edges, and became itself broken, its electricity, its memory and neurons corrupting and corrupting, searching for belonging until there was nothing left but static and decay.

It’s evident in fact that when the villagers fear for their own lives, they turn on the outsider — Katerina, who doesn’t look like them, even though her grandmother lived in the cottage before her, her mother grew up in the village. But her father, he was Indian, and Katerina has some of his coloring. Her hair are black, not fair like that of the villagers; her eyes aren’t blue like theirs; her skin, perhaps a shade darker than theirs.

In their fear, it doesn’t matter that Katerina is the village healer. That her herbs and sprays are keeping their crops free of disease; her medicines are keeping the village healthy. When the fear of an infectious ghost disease catches hold, the village turns on Katerina and the strangers she brought into the village.

Margarite spoke over her. ‘We never wanted you here anyway. Your baba wouldn’t want you in her house. You’ve never fitted in. She knew that.’ The hypocrisy, Katerina thought faintly. The sheer hypocrisy of Margarite, who had fled the village and headed west the day she turned sixteen and only came home again in a wave of refugees escaping the xenophobia of a new government. Both of them had come here only when there was nowhere else to go, both of them had rebuilt a shattered life here. So why did Margarite belong, when she didn’t? A pointless question if ever there was one.

There is so much that can be said here for the way we treat one another in the here and now. Our suspicion and on occasion downright hatred based on religion, caste, color, race. The othering of an entire people that makes it possible for a genocide to be played out, in real time, on our screens. The fear mongering that drives elections around the world. The walls we want to build, the people we want to keep out, the fear, the fear, the fear.

And yet — what happens if we choose love, instead?

Acceptance, understanding, compassion, empathy. That is who we can be at our best. But still, we often get swayed by the people who appeal to our worst.

Wrapping it up

With all of these big themes woven through the book you’d think it would be ponderous, preachy perhaps? But it isn’t. What you have instead is a very human story set in a post-apocalyptic world. This isn’t the world of Furiosa or Mad Max, which is a good thing in my books. People aren’t killing one another or fighting over water.

Instead, they are living their lives as best they can. Tending their fields and their vegetable patches. Catching fish. Harvesting herbs. Chasing away digital ghosts. Until a strange young boy comes into their midst, trailing behind him rumors of harvest failure and a rampant digital disease that is stirring up the ghosts.

What follows then is a novel that will make you think about the ways that we live; the effect that the internet is having on every area of our lives; the ways in which we gather and the ways in which we other; about self-sufficiency and herbalism and communal living, and going off-grid.

Highly, highly recommended!