Braving the Labyrinth

Geoffrey O’Brien is one of those writers who can write about anything: opera, British postwar film, crime fiction, the Third Reich, Grant Wood, Patti Smith, Duke Ellington, Seinfeld. Yet these subjects are often united by a kind of nostalgia—or more precisely, the kind of nostalgia induced by pop culture artifacts. His essay from our August 20, 2026, issue, “A Gust from Another World,” is about the Bridey Murphy craze of the 1950s, which was sparked by the account of a young Colorado woman who discovered, under hypnosis, that she was possessed by the spirit of a long-dead Irishwoman. The dubious story (first documented in a book by her hypnotist, then adapted into a movie) helped give rise to a fascination with the unconscious, hypnotists, the afterlife, and mind control. For O’Brien, who remembers the craze from his childhood, it was “a blast from the country of the dead” that cut through a midcentury world “grounded in practicalities, reassured by material things that functioned: fuse boxes, automobile engines, lawn mowers, power drills, reel-to-reel tape recorders.”O’Brien has written nine books of poetry, a novel, and ten books of nonfiction. He was for many years the editor in...