For fans of The Wizard Of Oz, Gregory Maguire's first adult novel, Wicked: The Life And Times Of The Wicked Witch Of The West, was an odd, off-kilter sort of revelation. Maguire remade Wizard's main baddie as a protagonist with a name, a family, a history, a series of pathologies, a college education, a political cause, and much more. But his not-so-wicked witch never quite cohered as a character, due to the constraints of the original story; when Maguire's complex and sympathetic heroine was forced into scripted villain behavior where the movie and book intersected, the discontinuity became achingly acute. Similarly, his sophomore effort, Confessions Of An Ugly Stepsister, turned the Cinderella fable into a dry, plodding, intricate family history that didn't leave plausible room for pumpkin-chariots and transformed mouse-horses. Maguire seems to have learned his lesson with Lost, a spooky, deeply felt ghost story which touches briefly and variously on Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol, Peter Pan, Alice In Wonderland, and Jack The Ripper. But the characters and storyline are original, giving Maguire the room he needs to spread out and stretch his own imagination instead of being limited by those of other writers. Here, his central character is a divorced, middle-aged writer of children's books, struggling to produce what may be her first adult novel. Winifred Rudge, American descendant of a haunted Englishman who might have been Dickens' inspiration for Ebenezer Scrooge, returns to her ancestor's row house in Britain to visit her cousin John and work on her book. But when she arrives, John is missing and two workmen are nervously contemplating the aggressive, mysterious noises coming from a kitchen wall they're supposed to be tearing down. A theatrical faux-psychic, an amiable professor, and John's acidic lover all add to the confusion, pulling Rudge in various helpful or harmful directions. Maguire has backed off a bit from the complexities and aridities of his earlier adult books—Lost reads more like the tragicomic novels of Connie Willis, who specializes in similarly baffled protagonists surrounded by conflicted, comic characters and trying to make order out of inspired chaos. As a result, Lost is far more readable and entertaining than Wicked or Stepsister. It doesn't have those books' iconic value or narrative daring, but it doesn't have their sense of forced falsity, either. For the first time, Maguire is talking entirely in his own voice, and that voice proves enthralling.