“Literature — the top-shelf, award-winning stuff — is positively ectoplasmic these days, crawling with hauntings, haints and wraiths of every stripe and disposition. These ghosts can be nosy and lubricious, as in George Saunders’s Lincoln in the Bardo … [or] confused by their fates, as in Martin Riker’s new novel, Samuel Johnson’s Eternal Return … They terrify, instruct and enchant — sometimes all in the same book.” For instance, Lauren Groff’s Florida, Viet Thanh Nguyen’s The Refugees, Angela Flournoy’s The Turner House, Hari Kunzru’s White Tears, and Jesmyn Ward’s Sing, Unburied, Sing. Parul Sehgal looks at the genre’s hold on writers and readers alike.