The ghost story shape-shifts because ghosts themselves are so protean — they emanate from specific cultural fears and fantasies. They emerge from their time, which is why Jacobeans saw ghosts wearing pale shrouds and Victorians saw them draped in black bombazine. It’s tempting to regard these apparitions as dark mirrors — Tell me what you fear and I’ll tell you who you are. I’m reminded of the governess in “The Turn of the Screw,” who arrives at her new posting and is delighted to discover that her room has two full-length mirrors, an unimaginable luxury and a clever bit of narrative forecasting; she will soon encounter mirrors of a different sort in the form of two ghosts (or are they?) haunting her young charges.

However, ghost stories are never just reflections. They are social critiques camouflaged with cobwebs; the past clamoring for redress. The writer Philip Ball has described traditional ghosts as social conservatives who enforce norms — the visitors to Ebenezer Scrooge, for example, or the ghost of Hamlet’s father, who protests the horror of his murder as well as the offense of it: “Murder most foul, as in the best it is; / But this most foul, strange, and unnatural.”

In the modern ghost story, especially the American kind, something different occurs. Ghosts protest norms — slavery, Jim Crow, mass incarceration — the norms that killed them. Among the slew of new books, you will find such ghosts in Jesmyn Ward’s “Sing, Unburied, Sing,” Hari Kunzru’s “White Tears,” Natashia Deón’s “Grace,” Angela Flournoy’s “The Turner House,” Brit Bennett’s “The Mothers.” These novels are impossible to generalize; they are as various as the spirits who inhabit them: the blues musician avenging himself on the white hipsters who stole his music in “White Tears,” the ghost of a young boy killed in Mississippi’s Parchman Farm prison in “Sing, Unburied, Sing.” But the spirits all speak with an authority older than any norm or nation. In “Grace,” an enslaved woman on the run is shot by bounty hunters but hovers on earth. She will not leave her child; she will try to trump death.

These ghosts are of America’s making. And in testifying to their deaths at the hands of police, poverty and racist violence, they lead us back to the nation’s foundational crimes of chattel slavery and genocide — as well as its energetic amnesia. The historian Thomas Laqueur has noted that unlike in Germany or South Africa, with their prevalence of monuments, museums and plaques to national crimes, there is “no remotely comparable memorial culture in the United States to the legacy of slavery.”

If the crimes of America’s origin are routinely whitewashed in public life, they remain central to its literature, in which the nation has been depicted not only as haunted but cursed, from Hawthorne on. His novel “The House of the Seven Gables” tells the story of the unhappy Pyncheons, who live under an ancestral hex for cheating a family out of their home. The notion of a curse flows through the work of Toni Morrison and Cormac McCarthy. It’s the central strand in Faulkner, as J. M. Coetzee described it: “The theft of land from the Indians or the rape of slave women comes back in unforeseen form, generations later, to haunt the oppressor.”