[1] On the “Acknowledgments” page of the novel, Gardner says that the town of Susquehanna, Pennsylvania is the “fictionalized setting of most of this novel’s action.”[2] The main protagonist is Peter Mickelsson, at onetime “a frequently written about football player,”[3] but now a Professor of Philosophy at Binghamton University.

During his personal descent into some kind of madness or dark night of the soul,[4] which he seems powerless to stop, Mickelsson buys a farmhouse in northern Pennsylvania's Endless Mountains.

At the time of its publication in 1982, many reviews of Mickelsson's Ghosts expressed “disapproval,”[6] and were “tepid, if not harsh,” as Gardner’s biographer Barry Silesky has noted.

DeMott thought that Gardner was unable to pull off the task and the standard he himself had set with his previous work, especially Nickel Mountain.

It's as if the world had suddenly become unbearably vivid again, after all our disillusionment and irony.”[8]Since the initial “mixed” and “tepid” reception of Mickelsson's Ghosts in the early 1980s, the novel has slowly gained in stature, and now is viewed as one of Gardner’s important novelistic achievements.