'Some Girls Wander by Mistake' by Nadia Bulkin - Running Review of Uncertainties IV

The Gothic is a literature of obsession, and ours is an obsessive age. Many of the stories chosen by Timothy J. Jarvis for Uncertainties IV reflect this, none more so than Nadia Bulkin's elegant, chilly tale.

A young woman goes missing in small town America. The police issue a description, and so forth. One young woman living in a nearby city becomes fixated on the disappearance and talks of nothing else, spends hours online, and becomes convinced she saw the woman's ghost. The disappearance consumes her life. During a call her mother reveals that a tendency to wander may run in the family.

She boards up the windows of her apartment, tries to convince the police to dig up a construction site, sees the ghost of the missing girl again, and eventually drives out into the country as the snow starts to fall... The story has a fine symmetry, and offers many interpretations. But what lingers in the memory is the way that one loss leads to another with a kind of wild, lurching fatalism. As well as obsession, the Gothic offers extreme isolation, emotional and/or physical. A faint light in the woods is often all we have to steer by.

More from this running review very soon, if I don't go astray.