Passive intruder

On a cross-country train trip, a young woman grows convinced that she and her photojournalist husband are being pursued, by whom or by what is unclear - even in the snapshots taken by her camera-obsessed husband. In the sanctuary of his consulting rooms, a gay psychiatrist is unable to shake the influence of a mercurial first lover, taking lovers carelessly and then withdrawing into himself as the epidemic appears and spreads.

When the wife and psychiatrist cross paths, their respective pasts become unpredictably alive and threatening, unveiling secrets, fears, sympathies, and desires.

Passive Intruder is a literary ghost story, a suspenseful meditation on the ghosts and premonitions that haunt our everyday lives. Set mostly in the Seattle of the early 1990s - but making stops in San Francisco, New Orleans, Boston, and Chicago - it ranges in tone from the erotic to the hallucinatory, as Michael Upchurch examines the shifting boundaries of sexuality, the fetishism of photography, and the disorienting vertigo of early bereavement in the age of AIDS.

Playfully probing and delectably eerie, Passive Intruder confirms Upchurch as a strikingly fresh voice in American fiction.