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The origin of Ghost Town, the latest novel by James R. Gregory, lies in a specific auditory memory: a laugh, echoing from the mouth of a mine shaft. Dr. Gregory was ten years old at the time, sitting in his father’s Chevy pickup truck in western Pennsylvania, waiting to haul a load of coal back to their basement. In that grayscale landscape, he encountered a boy his own age, the son of the mine owner, coated head to toe in soot, with only his eyes visible. When the boy invited Dr. Gregory into the dark recesses of the earth, the future author accepted, only to be terrified by the reverberation of an approaching coal car. He scrambled out into the light, pursued by the sound of the other boy’s laughter.
“That sound echoed all my life,” Dr. Gregory told me. It is this lingering resonance of industry and isolation that Dr. Gregory seeks to capture in Ghost Town. The novel transports readers to Sulfur Creek, originally Crystal Creek, a rugged settlement where the booming industrial promise of the late nineteenth century collides with the quiet, soot-stained lives of its inhabitants.
For Dr. Gregory, a man who spent the bulk of his career as a global branding visionary, shaping identity, clarity, and persuasion for corporations, the transition to fiction has been an exercise in what he calls “fictionalized memoir.” After selling his business in 2013, he turned from business texts to storytelling, finding that the construction of a narrative arc offered a different kind of satisfaction than the construction of a corporate image. Ghost Town marks his third foray into fiction in as many years, following Zephyr’s War and Killer App.
The narrative of Ghost Town is anchored by two divergent figures who embody the friction of the age. There is Sammy Murphy, the first child born in the isolated enclave, who navigates a life circumscribed by dark mine shafts and a longing for connection. Sammy’s existence is one of near-total sequestration. He grows up wanting nothing more than to emulate his father, a miner. His emotional landscape is dominated by an unrequited love for Birdie, a girl who, upon their first meeting, recoils from his coal-dusted visage.
Pitted against Sammy’s earthy humility is the antagonist, Barry Bacon. Raised in the shadow of Fifth Avenue mansions, Bacon is a man whose ambition outstrips his social standing. He is not quite a Rockefeller or a Carnegie, but he possesses a hunger to become the “Merchant of Coal.” Dr. Gregory sketches Bacon not as a cartoon villain, but as a man undone by a fatal, classical flaw: arrogance. Bacon refuses to listen to engineers or the educated, a hubris that manifests in the physical destruction of the landscape, the trees cut down, the earth hollowed out. “He was basically a good man,” Dr. Gregory observes, “but his personality overcame him.”
The setting itself functions as a third protagonist. Dr. Gregory describes the atmosphere of Sulfur Creek with a visceral chill, noting a dampness that “goes right through your coat and into your bones.” It is a world built on the transient nature of extraction towns, places erected for utility, destined to crumble once the veins of coal run dry.
There is a certain irony in Dr. Gregory’s current vocation. Despite a lifetime spent mastering the art of marketing, he admits that promoting his own fiction is the “most inconvenient thing” about the authorial life. He prefers the pure entertainment of the first draft, or the puzzle-solving of the second, to the drudgery of the fourth draft or the mechanics of sales. “I’m a pretty good marketer,” he confesses, “but I have so much trouble marketing my own books.”
The content creation continues. James Gregory is already looking ahead to his next project, Undercurrent, a departure into the political thriller genre set in Florida, tackling the volatile subject of immigration. But for now, he remains occupied with the echoes of Pennsylvania. In Ghost Town, he has returned to that frightened ten-year-old boy in the Chevy pickup, listening to the laughter from the dark, attempting to understand the forces, ambition, love, and the relentless drive of industry, that shape a life before it fades into history.