Seanan McGuire is an author whose name I have seen around for many years but never picked up ... until a recent visit to the bookstore, when the cover of Sparrow Hill Road caught my eye. I decided it was time to give McGuire a try.

Rose Marshall was just 16 years old in Buckley Township, Michigan, in 1952 when a tardy prom date inadvertently led to her death on a lonely mountain road. Since then, she has haunted the highways, roadside diners and truck stops of rural America, spawning countless stories about a ghostly hitchhiker. She's an urban legend, figuring into many tall tales about a girl along the lonely roadway.

But Rose isn't just any old ghost -- she's a psychopomp, a spirit who escorts those who die on the road into the afterlife. When she can, she saves a few from undeserved fates.

Along the way, she interacts with plenty of sorry souls, including lonely truck drivers, a cheerleader who can't comprehend what just happened to the bus she was riding on, a descendant with a very bad plan, a loner who is still trying to hold up a diner 21 years after his death -- but whose corporeal remains are still enough to shoot living bystanders -- and a girl/woman who can only be saved from her fate so many times.

The story leapfrogs back and forth through time, touching on various chapters of Rose's life and afterlife throughout roadside America. It's a fairly solitary existence, although Rose meets a lot of people, some of whom -- like her -- are still wandering the country after their deaths. She also has a friend in Emma, a banshee whose family obligations have expired and is now running a diner for the dead.

You'll also meet with different types of ghosts and spirits, each type of which has different attributes, different functions, and different rules to follow. Some are allies, some are not; some are spiteful, others are simply pitiable, and some just want to be left alone. Vehicles, too -- and, to a certain extent, the road itself -- have a certain kind of afterlife that can sometimes influence the course of events.

But ageless Rose also has a mission ... to avoid -- or find and stop -- an undying man named Bobby Cross, who traded his soul for eternal life and, if he can sacrifice others in his place and absorb their souls, eternal youth as well. Rose is the spirit who got away -- the one whose soul he failed to collect after causing her violent and untimely death -- and he's been hounding her for the past 60 years, hoping to collect her at last. Meanwhile, she keeps helping those people she can, ushering on those she can't, and trying to savor what few aspects of the living she can experience along the way.

Rather than being a straightforward novel, Sparrow Hill Road is a series of vignettes and adventures from Rose's afterlife ... based, I believe, on a series of short stories that predated this novel. While connected through her own backstory and the ongoing conflict with Bobby Cross, many of the chapters are otherwise fairly unrelated except through Rose's involvement. It's a ghost story, it's a bit melancholy, and at times it's even a bit of a romance.

Originally published in 2014, the book was reissued with an objectively worse cover in 2018, which is also when The Girl in the Green Silk Gown, the first of two sequels, appeared in what was by then called the Ghost Roads series. Sparrow Hill Road is a stand-alone book, however; readers are free to choose to continue with the afterlife adventures of Rose Marshall -- aka the Phantom Prom Date, the Girl in the Diner and the Ghost of Sparrow Hill Road, among other nicknames earned over the years -- or let it end here.

In any case, McGuire has crafted a new folklore that ties the American highways and byways and lonely country roads to various aspects of mortality, immortality and the barriers in between. It's deeply rich and has endless possibilities for further exploration and development. We'll see if there's any more to come.