The omnipresent dead are in the marrow of The Vanishers, the new novel by Heidi Julavits. Its heroine, Julia, is a rising star at an elite psychic institute called The Workshop. The environment is cutthroat; students vie to distinguish themselves and compete for the attention of Madame Ackerman, the grande dame of the school and the psychic genius behind exercises like petrifying meat with the mind. Students who end up, after the exercise, with only a smog of rot in their dorm rooms are referred to as “Mortgage Payments,” while students like Julia are, if lucky, offered the chance to work as Madame Ackerman’s stenographer, scribbling notes about her “regressions”: psychic voyages to other places and time periods.
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