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Fiction
He’s Written Great Books About Sex in Suburbia. This One’s a ‘Ghost Town.’
A middle-aged novelist sifts through memories of growing up in New Jersey in Tom Perrotta’s frustratingly formulaic book.
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Alamy
By
Alexandra Jacobs
April 26, 2026,
5:00 a.m. ET
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GHOST TOWN,
by Tom Perrotta
Upon finishing Tom Perrotta’s new novel, “Ghost Town,” I found myself agreeably haunted by the corpulent specter of Harold Bloom: the late, great literary critic who
called the Harry Potter books
“rubbish only good for the dustbin where they will certainly wind up in a generation or so,” and
Stephen King
“immensely inadequate” and “a writer of penny dreadfuls.”
In “Ghost Town,” a successful author named Jay Perry, a minor-league version of the successful author Perrotta, is fretting about his legacy. He has suffered from a crude version of what Bloom called “
the anxiety of influence
,” maybe even with regard to … Stephen King.
A graduate of Princeton and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop (as Perrotta is of Yale and Syracuse), Perry had a 15-year run as a “literary writer,” with diminishing returns. His oeuvre includes a short-story collection featuring a Pennywise-like clown who dies during a kindergartner’s birthday party while one dad is making out with a mom ghost.
Ghost Town
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Perry promised his wife that his next book would be commercial, and pounded out a supernatural noir called “Ghost Teacher.” His agent persuaded him to make the teacher a “guiding spirit” for underdog students, and a successful young-adult series and animated TV show were born.
But Perry, now a financially secure empty nester with an infinity pool in the Hollywood Hills — if not quite the clout of Perrotta, whose sexy screen adaptations include
“Election,”
“Little Children”
and
“The Leftovers”
(
reviewed by King
in the Times Book Review) — has grown melancholy and reflective. What story does he have left to tell?
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