Vigil

Saunders sets up a promising premise — a ghost tasked with comforting a dying, unrepentant oil baron — then promptly buries it under an avalanche of supernatural visitors, symbolic animals, and philosophical asides that cancel each other out. The title promises stillness. The book delivers chaos. Jill, our narrator, is supposed to be the quiet moral center, but she never gets the space to breathe, let alone resonate. Boone is a cardboard villain who asks nothing of the reader. The Dickens comparisons in the blurbs should have been a warning: where Dickens used three ghosts with surgical precision, Saunders sends in a crowd. Loud, restless, and ultimately empty.