Funds for Bookworm are provided in part by Lannin Foundation.

You are a human animal.

You are a very special breed.

Or you are the only animal.

Who can think, who can reason, who can read.

From KCRW Santa Monica, I'm Michael Silverblatt, and this is Bookworm.

You know, there are books that I admire, there are books that I like a lot,

there are books that I admire despite the fact that I don't like them.

And then there are books I love.

And there is virtually no explaining how a book moves from admiration to love.

But the books of Jonathan Carroll automatically do for me.

Jonathan Carroll is my guest today. His new book is The Ghost in Love. It's a novel published by the Sarah Crichton imprint at Farras Strauss and Giroux.

And I want everyone to know about these books.

They're novels that I would call in the genre of the visionary supernatural.

By this, I mean the kind of book that C.S. Lewis wrote when he wrote the screw tape letters,

the books of Herman Hesse when he's

writing novels about students into whose lives the unusual and the metaphysical intrudes.

They're books that capture my heart in almost every way because in addition to being about matters of life and death,

they're very imaginative, and you feel about the characters the way you feel about J.D. Salinger

characters. They're characters of a sort that don't usually occur in visionary novels.

They're everyday people in and out of love, feeling pain or going through a crisis.

And the books are in a way like the novels in this genre that I'm claiming exists without any certainty that it does,

...