Artist Kate Paul reviews Ghost Driver, the first novel by Nell Osborne, published by MOIST.
Malory, the character whose life carries Ghost Driver, lacks a normal life force. She is somehow unwell – she knows her membranes don’t contain her from the world – so the novel is unwell, and the plot is sickening. In reading it I find what it is to be dysregulated by the laws of living. Novels are often too lawful, but Ghost Driver is unlawful, like some kind of freak occurrence.
Ghost Driver’s unlawful quality is not surprising. Nell Osborne’s work is always both organised and unruly. She is a poet, now a novelist, and a former PhD researcher at the University of Manchester. During her time as a researcher, and with academic and writer Hilary White, she started an organisation and zine series called Academics Against Networking, ‘as a creative and critical response to the ongoing institutionalisation of Networking Culture within academia; as a site of resistance to the banal perversion of language & knowledge that it enforces, and its boring extrovert tactics’. Her 2024 poetry collection with Monitor Books is called Thank You For Everything and also refuses governance while holding the tension of governance’s forcefulness. It includes a Poetry IQ test. Ghost Driver reads as an expansion of all of this work, resisting – through perversion – the banality and violence of governance. Desiring autonomy persistently.
Ghost Driver was written in large part in Manchester. The city in the novel is like so many cities, becoming to its occupants a steady increase of outer surface, as more and more of the land is taken for business use. In Ghost Driver it is ‘The Institution’ that makes cancer of the city, ‘educational and parasitical, rebuilding the body’s body, as an idea, from the inside out’. Malory works at The Institution, participating in Professional Self Development Portfolio events that seem to be about vigorously recirculating contained energy, including by pressuring workshop participants to mime alien greetings. A proud workshop leader receives a reward for this energy circulation:
A metaphysical gold star was being awarded somewhere, somewhere on this very estate, even now, even now yes. Yes, even now it was pinned to a chest filled with air.
And the Institution hires private security agents to maintain its cubic territories, where the city’s wealthier inhabitants now co-live.
In the rest of the city, terrifying Volunteer Policemen have been invited to ‘have a go’ at policing everyone else, as
[…] raggedly dressed figures of police-like authority arguing pedantically with children, harassing homeless people, or else roaming back alleys at night in search of some opportunistic performance of masculine power.
The petty masculine loserdom of the Volunteer Policemen has a vibratingly volatile force that impinges on the plot. By the plot I mean who Malory is, how she energetically recoils, and what becomes of her. Volunteer Policemen are a wraith-like small-headed regulating idea that impinge upon Malory.
While she, in an early moment in the novel, encounters a Volunteer Policeman who claims tauntingly to seek a criminal matching her description, her therapist determines that there’s a small-scale criminal at large inside her body and mind. Malory reflects on this idea: ‘[She] was harbouring a criminal (she hadn’t felt so well in months).’ She emails all her friends about it: ‘I’m disturbed. Very apparently☺.’ Most of her friends do not answer this email. The nested figure of the criminal animates the novel. It reminds me of Patricia Highsmith’s iconic crime novels, which also have the bodily sensations of criminality at their heart, with the energies of dread and sexuality creating the movement of the plot.
In its absurdity and handling of professional logics, though, Ghost Driver sits alongside Isabel Waidner’s 2021 novel Sterling Karat Gold, a queer working-class rewriting of Kafka’s 1925 novel The Trial, giving state violence and resistance to state violence a hallucinogenic treatment that seems to recover psychic ground for its readers. Some of Waidner’s characters find complicity in absurdity. Osborne’s Malory, on the other hand, is really all alone. It seems that this aloneness has something to do with sickness, and something also to do with the wish to be left alone. There’s an absurdity that enters the system of the body which explodes or leaks everywhere else like creamy orange fountains of liquid spurting from a dying slug. The insides cannot be trusted to stay inside and for the outsides, the same; nested systems enter one another and touch. Meanwhile, the prose is absolutely clear, strange, funny, gross, beautiful. It is carefully organised while holding large amounts of disorder.
Plot is normally regulated by some dominating version of agency. Sometimes the way that plot regulates a novel is too normal to see. But this regulation is shown to be unfit for purpose in Ghost Driver, or maybe too fit for some bad unstated purpose, like policing. Instead of dominating, the plot (by which I mean Malory) is dominated. The laws of physics, of fortune, of romance, of decency, of self-control, of psychic life and eventually of architecture overlap with complicity but without harmony, and then spout out of themselves ridiculously, and always to Malory’s disadvantage, with stupid and forceful calculation from who knows where. Only Malory seems to be able to perceive the wrongness at play, in her unwellness (‘of course, unwell people are often very perceptive’). Malory is also living in pain – she is doing pain – and this is part of the plot because it is part of her. In this context, the criminal justice system of self-management, learned mainly through the judgements of peers and other authorities, is at fault.
Ghost Driver’s epigraph is from a letter by the poet Emily Dickinson, written in 1862: ‘I had no Monarch in my life, and cannot rule myself, and when I try to organise – my little Force explodes – and leaves me bare and charred’. The mood is definitely very Ghost Driver, but I feel that as well as voicing that little Force that tries and fails at self-rule, Ghost Driver voices a clear anti-managerial feeling. To make an anti-managerial novel is unusual. I am hazily aware of a managerial voice that has been fashionable in the writing of prose, which writes something of what it is to be formed by this time. It is the professional managerial-class voice of the one who tries very hard to find and follow the laws of living. But the laws themselves are not often so lost and humiliated as they are in Ghost Driver. In this respect, in including the humiliation of the laws – in bringing the laws down with it – Ghost Driver reminds me of Sarah Bernstein’s work, for instance her 2021 novel The Coming Bad Days.
In a 2023 post on MIRABILARY, the poet Anne Boyer’s blog, Boyer wrote about poetry and the law:
No one obeys a poem, and even if they tried to, the poem would vanish at the attempt […] A poem is no employment handbook with beige heartlessness, either, nor are most poems effective guides to etiquette. Poetry is not even like natural law, unless it is the low-down law of nature in its ironic moods like that time someone I know saw a snake eating a frog and believed they had seen a frog with a very long, snake-shaped tail.
Ghost Driver is like this poetry in that I think it would also disappear if you tried to obey it. It is unruly to a microscopic level. On the cover of Ghost Driver is an electron microscope image of the foot of a common housefly, whose relevance to the plot may be considered in the chapter called INTRODUCING THE BIG FLY. The chapters all have apparently helpful names, like A BRIEF HISTORY OF TRAUMATIC EVENTS PROVIDING CONTEXT, and THE IMPORTANCE OF FUN, and ENDING. As well as refusing natural law, the book also pretends helpfully to hold order, or half-hold it, like an earnest child who makes a disturbingly neat drawing of a school burning down, with vomit also coming out.
There’s an early small moment of relief in Ghost Driver, where Malory escapes from a social gathering with a vicious jury of her academic peers, and goes out: ‘Malory was happy to be outside, could get evil freely, the steady rain, faces like orbs of streaked light, flaming’. It’s not like Ghost Driver is making you any recommendations, its protagonist just seems trapped somewhere very bad. But this line about getting evil freely is one I will be keeping in mind.
Ghost Driver by Nell Osborne is published by MOIST on 30 September 2025.
Kate Paul is an artist from Manchester. She makes sound works, texts, performances, installations and publications. She has been published in Serres Journal (2025), Fieldnotes Journal (2023) and projects by other writers. Her recent solo exhibition Whatever is Called the World (38 min 28 sec) took place at Listen Gallery in Glasgow this year, and dealt with plots of dependency and rescue.
This review is an independent commission from Corridor8, funded by Substack subscriptions and donations.
Published 18.09.2025 by Jazmine Linklater in Reviews
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