The prolific Paul Di Filippo was a principal influence back in the day, when I was channeling all my energies into a (misbegotten?) short fiction career. Inventive, unpredictable, full of exuberance for language, Di Filippo has produced hundreds of stories across the spectrum of specfic, and the breadth and versatility of his body of work is still an inspiration. I was long overdue to read more of his stuff, so was pleased to find Vangie’s Ghosts (2024) during a recent Powell’s trip.
Vangie’s Ghosts is a multiverse novel, revolving around a remarkable young girl named Evangeline who possesses the uncanny ability to communicate with alternate versions of herself across the infinitudes of time and space. Di Filippo eases us into meeting “Vangie” through the eyes of a social worker named Kris Troy, whose interactions with her at her foster home entangle Kris with her brothers and sisters there, as well a charismatic cult leader named Vardis Salthouse. A peculiar, uncommunicative child, Vangie nonetheless possesses a robust inner life borne of her ability to confer with the multiversal “ghosts” who advise her from other timelines. Initial experiments with her powers develop thanks to her foster siblings and, later, Salthouse’s exploitative pseudoreligious ministry, but as her powers grow and she learns to jump from one reality to another, the narrative mutates, shifting points of view to relate Vangie’s infinite-worlds-spanning battle against a similarly empowered being known as “the Massive.”
A multifaceted work that relentlessly changes tack, Vangie’s Ghosts is a great example of Di Filippo’s restless creativity, a novel that starts at weird and gets ever weirder. The multiverse subgenre — as popularized by Everything Everywhere All at Once, the MCU, and numerous other recent novels — has definitely been having a moment; given the dismal state of our “spoke,” I suppose that’s to be expected. (Who wouldn’t like to pivot to a better timeline right about now?) What makes Di Filippo’s take special is his rigorous, next-level dive into the thought experiment; he takes the reader on an unexpected journey, one that starts small, then relentlessly asks the next question to broaden and explore the concept. It’s is full of Di Filippo’s characteristic, quirky humor and language, yet embeds a dark, cautionary layer under the shenanigans — having fun with the reality-warping powers, but also critiquing the power-madness that might result. The resulting concoction is weirdly shaped but uniquely satisfying, both Golden Age old-fashioned and utterly contemporary — almost as if several versions of the author, from several different eras, were collaborating across timelines.
