There is a specific scene early in Emily Brontë’s great novel Wuthering Heights (1847) that has been made famous by Kate Bush: Stranded by the weather and set to sleep in an old room at the titular moorland farmhouse, Lockwood—a new tenant of the local landlord, Heathcliff—encounters the pleading ghost of the room’s previous occupant, Catherine Earnshaw. “Let me in,” she says, to his horror. “Let me in!”

But Catherine’s ghost has in fact been troubling Heathcliff on many other occasions besides, or so he reveals much later in the novel. In this spirit, Kathe Koja returns to the West Yorkshire moors in Catherine the Ghost, exploring Catherine’s perspective of events—and offering a ghost’s-eye view of one of the great nineteenth-century English novels. It is also one of the least sparing of all works of fiction. Wuthering Heights is a novel of dysfunction—there is not an undamaged, nor even a sympathetic, character in the whole story—and its hallucinatory effect makes it open to a supernatural reading, and even more open to the dreamlike, impressionistic prose with which Kathe Koja retells Brontë’s masterpiece.

Not the least complication of Wuthering Heights is the doubling of names, and while Catherine the Ghost begins with the voice of Heathcliff’s love Catherine Earnshaw—who in the original novel marries Edgar Linton partly (she says) with the intention of using her position to uplift Heathcliff—in alternate chapters we see the viewpoint of Cathy Linton, the daughter whose birth took the life of Catherine Earnshaw. It is Catherine Earnshaw's ghost of course that is now haunting the present, and she is herself haunted—if a ghost can be haunted—by her betrayal of Heathcliff.

Heathcliff, Brontë tells us, left the moors only to return rich and embittered, marrying Edgar’s sister Isabella and exploiting the gambling habits of Catherine Earnshaw’s brother, Hindley, in order to become master of Wuthering Heights. Moving there herself after a (short-lived) marriage to Heathcliff’s weak and petulant son Linton, Cathy Linton also haunts—though physically and bodily—the room formerly inhabited by her mother, spelling out and “murmuring … like an incantation” the words scratched into the paintwork of the window-ledge: Catherine Linton Catherine Heathcliff Catherine Earnshaw.

While Cathy Linton is trying to imagine and understand the mother she never knew, Catherine Earnshaw, from her perspective in the grave, is more aware of the desires and motives of the living characters—particularly “our hidden enemy” Nelly Dean. Nelly, manipulating everyone—including and especially the dimwit “frame” narrator Lockwood—is probably the true villain of the novel. We who know Wuthering Heights know that Cathy Linton will eventually marry Hareton Earnshaw, Catherine Earnshaw’s nephew, who has been brought up brutalised and ignorant by Heathcliff—partly as an act of revenge for his own treatment by Hindley. But here, in Catherine the Ghost, we read the marriage through the ghost’s “whispers, [her] urgings for her to know Hareton”: “the thought comes [to Cathy Linton] like a murmur in her ear,” a premonition of what her life might be if she is open to Hareton’s overtures of friendship. The already complicated set of doublings in Wuthering Heights becomes even more complicated when we see events from a different perspective and understand that characters are reacting to impulses which are not necessarily their own.

In the original novel, the legal and moral ownerships of Wuthering Heights come together with Cathy’s marriage to Hareton, which is the nearest thing to a conventionally comforting ending that Brontë gives us. Even then, though, we are specifically told that the house will actually be left “for the use of such ghosts as choose to inhabit it,” since the happy couple will actually live in Thrushcross Grange, the seat of the Linton family. Catherine the Ghost takes us beyond all this. To do so, it needs to be read with the plot and text of Wuthering Heights in mind. This is its joy and—for those who need to go back to the novel—its difficulty.

Catherine the Ghost echoes, and even quotes verbatim, Brontë’s narrative; and it needs to be read carefully, for Koja is drawing our attention to the echoes and narrative rhymes Brontë inserted in her novel. The most significant example is, perhaps, the brief references in Wuthering Heights to “the fairy cave under Penistone Crags,” to which Cathy Linton is constantly asking her father if she is “old enough” to go. This location (based upon the natural hole in Ponden Kirk near Haworth, which has a similar association with marriage in local folklore to that which Brontë attributes to Penistone Crags) is expanded and given more significance in Catherine the Ghost. It is now where Heathcliff and the older Catherine “gave ourselves,” perhaps setting in motion the course of events which leads to the novel’s conclusion. The reference to “the mysteries of the Fairy Cave” being opened to Cathy Linton by Hareton thus becomes an echo of what has happened before, or perhaps another instance of manipulation from beyond the grave.

Shifting the narrative focus radically effects how these novels can be read. Cathy Linton-Heathcliff, the daughter, is the Catherine Heathcliff that Catherine, the mother, wanted to be; Lockwood’s first meeting with the ghost is rendered a bloody encounter with a stranger in the room Catherine shared “as children then not as children” with Heathcliff. After all, Lockwood says that he dreamed of the ice-cold hand of Catherine clutching him as she sobbed “Let me in”; but he is an unreliable narrator. Who should tell the tale of Wuthering Heights? And what effect does the teller have?

Brontë’s original allows the reader to ask who “owns” the narrative—the clearly unreliable Lockwood or the rather less obviously manipulative Nelly. Once Catherine Earnshaw is here allowed a voice, she too becomes a character with agency, rather than a puppet in the emotional melodrama centred around Heathcliff. Once she becomes a focus in this maelstrom, our attention is perhaps even drawn away from Heathcliff as a “Byronic hero” towards darker patterns and motives which the human narrators of the story are unable to see. But it’s clear that Kathe Koja is doing more than rewriting Brontë’s novel from a different perspective. What is happening in Catherine the Ghost is a subtle and often moving re-imagining of Wuthering Heights: Where some readers of the novel would pen an analytical essay, here we have instead a critical interpretation of it in the form of a creative engagement. Our attention is drawn to the novel, from the ghost hovering outside the window to the last, haunted days of Heathcliff, and Lockwood’s meditation over the graves of Catherine Earnshaw, Edgar Linton, and Heathcliff himself in “that quiet earth” under a “benign sky.” We know the ending. If we read the final sentence carefully, we know that Lockwood is as obtuse at the end of the novel as he was at the beginning, when he misread the relationship between Heathcliff and Cathy Linton. In place of this ignorance, Koja opens up the implications of Brontë’s language and both the “romantic” and supernatural/gothic interpretations that have been deduced from it.

As such, Catherine the Ghost is a difficult novel to review at length, because it is essentially a parallel text in which the poetic intertwining of voices within and between it and the originating work is part of the effect. Koja’s conclusion is emotionally darker, perhaps more fitted to a ghost story, than Brontë’s, although it arises appropriately from what we read in the final pages of Wuthering Heights: Lockwood is told by Nelly Dean that, after Heathcliff’s burial, she encountered a shepherd boy who is afraid to pass on the moors “Heathcliff and a woman.” Not the least of Catherine the Ghost’s attractions and achievements has to be simply this: that it confirms Wuthering Heights to be one of the great supernatural novels of the nineteenth century.