Ghost stories come in many different incarnations. There are the campfire tales about things that go bump in the night. There are legends about ghouls bent on revenge and fright night phantoms. And then there are stories about restless spirits who return to the world not to frighten the living but to guide them toward some buried truth.

Jesmyn Ward’s latest novel, Sing, Unburied, Sing, is that last type of ghost story. Set in the poor, rural South—a place chock full of eerie history, but not the type anyone goes on tours to see—the novel begins with Jojo: a boy not long from becoming a man, forced to grow up too soon. Jojo and his toddler-age sister Kayla live with their grandmother, who is withering away from cancer, and their grandfather, their primary caregiver who is still haunted by his years of unjust incarceration as a boy.

The kids’ mother, Leonie, is a phantom-like presence herself, fading in and out of her family’s life. She is waiting for Michael—the children’s white father—to finish a prison sentence so they can be reunited. Leonie seems less interested in parenting than getting high with her paramour and escaping from a world that won’t accept their love. But drugs also open a door in Leonie’s mind: It’s the only time she can see her dead brother, who was murdered when he was a teenager.

The plot spans only a few days, catalyzed by Michael’s release and the road trip to the prison Leonie takes to pick him up. The kids are forced to come along and to fend for one another in the face of neglect and danger. As the past and the present quite literally begin to meld as more and more ghosts reveal themselves, anxiety brews and builds to a brink that’s nearly unbearable.

Perhaps because Ward resists stereotyping, and because of the empathy that is imbued in the construction of the novel—the perspective shifts, back and forth, like a languid game of ping pong, between Jojo, Leonie, and a ghost from their ancestral past—Sing, Unburied, Sing leaves you with an understanding of the forces that have shaped life for this small family. Ward lifts the veil on their heartaches, which makes it hard to judge them for the cards they’ve been dealt. They are broken and fractured. But the pieces are held together by love and by the figures from the past who haunt them all.