I have always loved ghost stories – those that keep you up long past the lights were turned off. The ones that leave an unsettling feeling in your spine and gut, that make you question the boundaries of humanity. I have chased those tales from a young age. The first horror movie I watched was The Blair Witch Project (1999). I remember sneaking into our family living room, opening the tape box, praying that my parents wouldn’t hear the creak of the plastic contraband, and placing that forbidden treasure into the VCR. I stared at the TV wide-eyed and mesmerized, while desperately trying to peak behind the edges of the screen to catch a glimpse of the thing I was meant to be afraid of. See, in those films, you never know what haunts you. You just know that you are being haunted. 

Kevin Jared Hosein’s Hungry Ghosts is of the same vein as the forbidden pleasures of my youth. Love for the unknown, unseeable entity followed me through to adulthood and to some degree formed my literary consciousness. Hosein weaves together the lives of individuals from different walks of life—a drug dealer, a gambler, a transgender woman, and more. Each character’s journey unfolds in a poignant and heart-wrenching narrative, offering a raw and unflinching portrayal of their struggles. One sentence into the novel and I felt that eerie familiar sensation make its way down my spine and settle in my belly: “Four boys ventured to the river to perform a blood oath”. Oh, Kevin. What have you started? 

In the barracks, where entire families share single bedrooms, the Saroop family —consisting of Hans, Shweta, and Krishna— live a life dictated by poverty and faith. When the town madman, Dalton Changoors, disappears one day, leaving his wife alone in the decrepit estate, Hans attempts to change his family’s misfortunes by moving on to the property with Marlee Changoor. As the wide cast of characters revealed more of Trinidad to me and the language demanded me to accept Hindi without Googling meanings of phrases I had never heard. I knew what Hosein had done was both uniquely brilliant and yet familiar in a way that I had previously read. 

I first read Toni Morrison’s Beloved a few years back. As a literature student, I had heard of the text, but always felt a bit too intimidated by the lore of the title character to actually start reading it on my own. One day I was finally able to take the leap and ordered the book. Upon unboxing the package, I was faced with the cover image of a mother carrying what appeared to be a lifeless child. It is a confronting and unnatural image. As I entered the world of another of Morrison’s classics, the story of Sethe unfolded. Sethe once had a two-year-old daughter whom she was forced to kill to avoid the baby’s re-enslavement by their white overseer. The home that Sethe and her increasingly fragmented family live in is haunted first by grief and trauma which is then personified through the appearance of Beloved. As the story continues, Beloved becomes more and more greedy for her mother’s and sister’s attention. Soon, Sethe must quit her job in order to satisfy Beloved – to no avail. 

The colonial ghost is of a different caliber. Hosein was born in Trinidad and Tobago in 1986. His debut adult novel, Hungry Ghosts, published earlier this year, carries forth the tradition of Black authors utilizing science-fiction to tell the untellable — namely the effects of slavery and colonialism on a society. The imagination of the Black author is pushed past the limits of what is deemed humane in order to tell the story of those treated inhumanely. 

Beloved and Hungry Ghosts both occupy that space in between life and death. They convincingly flirt with the landscape of the afterlife. Just as in Morrison’s work, the families in Hosein’s novel are haunted by the ghost of those who were killed as the only means of obtaining freedom. The spaces they inhabit become putrid with roaming grief and a desire for reconciliation. The barracks in Hungry Ghosts in which the main family resides are thus described: 

These barracks were scattered like half-buried bones across the plain, strewn from their colonial corpse. In their marrow, the ghosts of the indentured. And the offspring of those ghosts. 

The title Hungry Ghosts is a translation of the Sanskrit word preta, derived from the word meaning “departed” or “deceased”. These supernatural beings co-exist with humans and in Hinduism and possess an insatiable hunger and thirst. Their presence is unrelenting. In this sense, grief could be said to become a tangible character in (post)colonial texts as Beloved and Hungry Ghosts. As Paul D details in Beloved, loneliness has the ability to take human form: 

There is a loneliness that can be rocked. Arms crossed, knees drawn up, holding, holding on, this motion, unlike a ship’s, smooths and contains the rocker. It’s an inside kind–wrapped tight like skin. Then there is the loneliness that roams. No rocking can hold it down. It is alive. On its own. A dry and spreading thing that makes the sound of one’s own feet going seem to come from a far-off place.  

Such loneliness prevails in the genre of Back speculative fiction, in which this text can arguably be considered.    

The parameters of love are also contended with in both texts, particularly in the case of parent-child relationships. The narrator of Beloved describes the caution that Paul D has when speaking about the love that Sethe has for her children: 

Risky, thought Paul D, very risky. For a used-to-be-slave woman to love anything that much was dangerous, especially if it was her children she had settled on to love. The best thing, he knew, was to love just a little bit, so when they broke its back, or shoved it in a croaker sack, well, maybe you’d have a little love left over for the next one. 

Love, here, can be weaponized against the parent. Love in such circumstances is a dangerous risk in the most literal sense. 

The aspect that makes good horror is the unrelenting presence of discomfort. Hosein hammers that emotion persistently. There is not a moment when reading where you can let your guard down. I am deeply moved by the notion of a hungry ghost that lingers in the memories of survivors of colonial trauma. All the more interesting is the common themes found in writers who are separated by distance and time, yet who can capture to insatiable desire for peace and recognition that has long been denied.  

Though I will never embarrass myself by calling another author a new Morrison, I will go as far to state that novels like Hosein’s further the discussion pioneered by Black authors such as Morrison and Octavia Butler. This is a conversation that addresses the inhumane violence and displacement forced onto the Black diaspora – whether that be in the Americas or the Caribbean – through a more distanced medium of speculative fiction. Hungry Ghosts propels that conversation forward in a region of the British Commonwealth that has consistently been disenfranchised, overlooked, and subjected to commodification. The text addresses the reverberating consequences of European and American colonialism in the Caribbean which have denied Caribbeans of their basic rights.  

Hungry Ghosts is a literary triumph that will linger in the hearts and minds of readers long after the final page is turned, leaving them with a profound appreciation for the complexities of human connection.  

Now that I am older and no longer looking behind the TV to see if the monsters are lingering there, I see that the real scary things lurk elsewhere. They are the unacknowledged grief that demands to be felt. The spooky entities are the ghosts that crave to be seen. And our ghosts need to always be hungry if we feed them.