Becoming more and more rare in this world of flash, gloss, and surface stories, Kim Powers reminds us with his first novel just how irreverent, offbeat, and wonderfully engaging a novel should be in “Capote in Kansas: A Ghost Story.” 

With the release of his first novel, Powers reminds readers of the power of novels of a bygone age, novels that dive beneath the surface into the undiscovered depths of the heart and mind that constructs humanity. 

From the childhood friendship of a little girl (a tom-boy seeking some mud to splash in) and a summer visitor in the form of a boy (cleanly dressed), Power constructs a haunting tale that follows a friendship into the depths of feeling and fear throughout a lifetime of artistic exploration and the consequences of such. 

In this regard, he turns to the literary legends Harper Lee and Truman Capote, and builds a haunting account of human emotion based on the collection of ghosts that haunt these writers.  Finding solace in the possibility of another’s ear, finding dreams that take hold of us in our waking moments, and finding horror in our own past endeavors, both characters awaken the possibility of feeling something other than the norms that permeate within the flashy images that surround today’s existence in the world. 

Driven from others into the passion of written words, these authors each find demons waiting beyond success (Capote’s killers, and Lee’s fame respectively), which serve as a cancer upon the creative heart leaving wounded intellects roaming in search of piece. Driven within this grasp beyond the usual, readers find an anti-climax materialize in the plot of the ghosts, but in so doing, we begin to ask difficult questions about the characters, the nature of haunted emotion, and maybe even about ourselves. 

With an elegance and depth too often missing from many fictional works these days, Powers crafts a masterful tale of ghosts literally crawling out of literary beauty, and in so doing, probes the deeper possibilities of human emotion within a world of passion intermingled with pain.