Having achieved great success with his reimagining of both The Wizard of Oz in The Wicked Years series and Cinderella in Confessions of an Ugly Stepsister, with Lost Gregory Maguire offers a ghost story evoking A Christmas Carol with a side order of Ripperology.

Winifred Rudge is a morose and rather prickly American author who has been living for years off the spoils of her bestselling astrology book, The Dark Side of the Zodiac; the fact that she has absolutely no faith in the veracity of astrology apparently not having hampered her ability to convincingly put pen to paper and tell other people what they want to hear. With sales of her book dwindling, Winifred needs a new source of income and so has begun work on a novel about a Wendy Pitzke, a woman on the trail of Jack the Ripper. Not having made great progress on the novel at home in New England, Winifred hops on a plane to old England in the hope of jump-starting her research. She intends to stay at the Hampstead flat of her step-cousin and friend John Comestor but, upon her arrival, she discovers that Comestor has mysteriously vanished, leaving behind no explanation for the two Catholic builders who are trying to build an unauthorized staircase to the roof of the building from his kitchen nor for the strange noises that emanate from the chimney behind the wall where they’re working. Even more mysterious, to Winifred’s mind at least, is the fact that the house used to belong to her great-great grandfather, the man rumoured to be the inspiration for Dickens’ Ebenezer Scrooge.

Winifred soon abandons her research in favour of investigating the twin spectres of Comestor’s disappearance and the ghostly noises behind the wall. While trying to discover Comestor’s whereabouts Winifred becomes acquainted with some of his bizarre neighbours and is forced to confront her family’s peculiar history as well as her own unvanquished past. Against her better judgement, Winifred is drawn to a psychic who warns her about the person associated with the shroud she finds nailed to the wall behind Comestor’s chimney. All the while Winifred pursues her own mysterious quests, the story of Wendy Pitzke is unfolding in her mind.

Winifred Rudge is not a particularly likable character. Even though she is the central personality in Lost, Winifred is very hard to get to know and even harder to sympathise with. Her reserved nature and the limited insight into her inner self that the reader gains are no doubt deliberate plot devices designed by Maguire to make the difficult truths about Winifred’s past that we ultimately learn more shocking but it still served to make me feel rather disengaged from her investigations. The pace of Lost is fairly ponderous and the story takes a while to really get going which also serves to distance the reader from the “action” and deadens the suspense of the hauntings and spooky occurrences. The premise of Lost was very good and Maguire certainly has a great comic touch but there was something lacking in the story.

Lost is the first of Gregory Maguire’s novels that I have read and I suspect that it is not really the best place to start. While I quite liked Lost and was fairly gripped by the spooky elements and overarching mystery of the story, I didn’t love the book and certainly didn’t develop anything near the devotion to Maguire’s storytelling that his earlier books, Wicked for example, seem to have inspired in other readers. I found Maguire’s writing style to be pleasant and reasonably engaging and he does have an interesting spin to put on well-established stories. I am certainly tempted to read one of his other novels to see whether his earlier work is indeed more compelling and hype worthy. Ultimately, Lost is a pretty good ghost story but perhaps not the best book to begin with if you are new to Maguire’s oeuvre.

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