SOURCE: "Ghosts," in The New York Times Book Review, Vol. 102, May 4, 1997, p. 6.

In the following review, Humphreys summarizes the theme and plot of Reading in the Dark, praising the characterizations and "animated" descriptions of inanimate objects.

Two memories rise, ominous as thunder on a clear day, in the opening pages of this first novel by the poet Seamus Deane. The narrator, an unnamed young man looking back on his childhood in Northern Ireland, remembers climbing the stair when he was 5. His mother had just started down, and they were about to meet on the landing when suddenly she said. "Don't move." He could see nothing between them except the window, where the Derry cathedral seemed to hang against the sky. But she saw more. "There's somebody there. Somebody unhappy. Go back down the stairs, son." And although later she reassured him there had been no ghost, "Just your...