Answer:
The excerpt comes from "Animal Farm", a work in which Orwell uses a farm ruled by animals to make an analogy of the Soviet Union under Stalin's rule.
The phrase is telling us that the characters (the animals who are under the rule of the pigs) are about to starve to death, and that death by starvation is like a ghost that is staring at them in the face, reminding them of such fact.
The literary devices used are allegory, because an abstract idea, is explained in a more concrete way.
