Charles Colley's first novel, as you read yesterday, has been a long time coming. And the first thing you'll notice while reading it is that he knows every inch of his characters, for good and bad. Every paragraph, while sometimes a bit too Dickensian in detail for my taste, is used to surround the 3-dimensional characters within it -- with love, with tragedy, with vindication.

I won't pretend to understand World War I-era Baltimore very well, but Colley has mastered the trick of time travel. I fell in love with his Baltimore, feeling just a touch of nostalgia and then pride in my city. I walked away with a new appreciation for Charm City and its inhabitants.

Likewise, I'm no expert on the experience of growing old, but following the tortured protagonists Jesse and Jim throughout their lives, you start to feel the wear of the ages. The story centers around these two, as Jim twists his life around to accomodate the love of his life, Jesse. She spends her life helping everyone she can, sometimes to the detriment of her life with her husband, and all the while fighting the ghostly voices she hears in her head and the unexplainable visions that become all-too real.

Eventually, Jim has to help his wife be rid of these voices once and for all, and in attempting to save her he may have to sacrifice his own sanity, or life.

I'm not sure if it's simply a side effect of growing up with a family of storytellers, or the familial basis of the events, but Colley never holds his characters at arm's length -- you know exactly where they're coming from and why. It's refreshing to see an author who doesn't fall into the trap of writing with such an air of detachment that the reader may be thrown out of the story altogether.

It's no surprise that I'm a fan of the more supernatural themes, as long as they're used as a vehicle and not a gimmick. Colley succeeds in using the ghost story to showcase the relationships in his novel, not to overpower the story with fancy tricks and deus ex machina.

There is drama, conflict, suffering and redemption, with no quick fixes for any involved. It feels real, and for any book that delves into the otherworldly, that is indeed impressive.