The Ghost-Maker Summary
Kathleen Kilgore

Everything you need to understand or teach The Ghost-Maker by Kathleen Kilgore.

  • The Ghost-Maker Summary & Study Guide

The Ghost-Maker Summary

The Ghost-Maker is rich in significant human themes, including growing up, the problems of children with divorced parents, truth and lying, conformity and rebellion, loyalty and betrayal.

These ideas are also developed in a tense, suspenseful narrative, focused on the teen-ager, Lee, who finds himself alone and lonely in the alien world of a community of retired senior citizens. The adjustment problems of Lee, a child of divorced parents, are set in the context of a mysterious world of spiritual charlatans, people who prey on the credulity of others and who make their careers out of deliberate but ingenious fraud. In this novel the author takes the realistic plight of a teenaged victim of parental separation and combines it with a sometimes hair-raising narrative of fraudulent "ghost makThe Ghost-Maker 3241 ers," individuals who practice a clever con-game by pretending to produce palpable images of the departed. The characterization is...

(read more from the Short Guide)