In the introduction to her collection, River of Bones, Rebecca Roanhorse asks the questions, “What do we owe our ancestors, what do we owe our history, and what do we owe ourselves?”

Impossibly big questions that thread a relationship between historical obligation, love, and retribution. Not only does Roanhorse not shy away from analyzing the complexity of characterizing what it means to be made a stranger in one’s own home, but she does it with a flexibility that efficiently portals the reader between subgenres, centering character arcs at the heart of her work. This comes across in “Welcome to your Authentic Indian Experience^TM,^” which has become one of Roanhorse’s most publicly recognized stories. Roanhorse explores the historically cyclical encounter of colonization from several different angles, including the visitor-(settler) asking the person from the culture they are about to dispossess to perform their culture before it is completely taken from them.

“A Harvest of Beating Hearts,” the second story in River of Bones is curious about the ways love invites us into the exploration of our anger. Wherein “Abigail Fields Recalls Her First Death, and, Subsequently, Her Best Life,” follows up with a fast-paced action sequenced story of a Black Native girl given a second chance at life by the desert spirits who she calls on to avenge her people killed by a white man.

A plant rooted in survival threads its way throughout this collection, not only emphasizing the decisions we make to survive, but also the grief in the loss that inevitably travels with survival. Roanhorse takes a writer’s scalpel to look for the pieces that are vanished in the process of surviving cultural, societal, and personal apocalypses. In “White Hills,” Roanhorse interprets Toni Morrison’s quote, “Sometimes you don’t survive whole, sometimes you survive in part…” quite literally when the protagonist is asked to give up a piece of her body in order to maintain the privileges she has been given access to because of her proximity to whiteness.

Nina Simone once said, “The role of the artist is to reflect the times,” and Rebecca Roanhorse reflects a full range of contemporary human sensibilities, acknowledging the subjectivity of morality, so the good, the bad and the ugly all are wrapped up into the possibilities of every person. Desire breeds obsession, love shields and protects what is vulnerable, while the cunningness that survival requires, asks us to be more curious than afraid of our own anger. Roanhorse does not imagine worlds where characters can fall neatly into any one category about anything.

Instead, lonely queer boys can summon the dead to save them, discontented women kill for their sapphic love, the monster-eater can and does become the monster, and spirits of the desert are on the side of the dispossessed, swallowing whole the dispossessor.

There is the story the people are given about the nation and there is the truth, scattered and fragmented at the site of its attempted destruction. Roanhorse, through insisting on the living of her Black and Native often Queer characters offers a counter-telling of the stories that relied on erasure to protect those in power. Dark fantasy and horror become a tool to depict the undercurrent of a country whose origins are founded on slavery and genocide.

“A Brief Lesson in Native American Astronomy” examines the objectification of women’s bodies with a body horror haunting that reflects the ghost of history sweeping through the relationships and world building of this collection. “Falling Bodies”, while taking place in a far future where Earth has been colonized by aliens, goes back in time to invoke the failed experiment of living side by side with one’s captors.

“River of Bones,” the title story which also happens to follow the second book in Roanhorse’s Sixth World series, closes out the reader out with a riveting eco-love story. The reader is invited to follow Kai and Maggie as they find their way back to each other in the midst of fighting for their lives, and their autonomy. This novella offers a delightful conclusion to an incredibly versatile collection.The last story is one that could not feel more timely in its solidifying the collection’s invitation into living and loving through the collapse of a political worldbuilding, while holding onto the most intimate experiences of grief, desire, heartbreak, and with the insistence on an unyielding spirit, hope.

But what a way to go out—a haunted house that is not remotely familiar to you. You have not walked these haunted halls. You don’t know what’s in that basement, I promise you don’t.

I first encountered Bernie Jean Schiebeling’s writing when they submitted to The Deadlands. We published “The Counting Ghosts,” in Issue #19 of The Deadlands. They have gone on to publish in Analog, The Drabblecast, Small Wonders, and more.

We’re absolutely delighted to share the cover of House, Body, Bird with you—but first, let’s talk to our author and get the VIBE of this place.

Birdie Goodbain, last of the House’s daughters, thought only the dolls were watching…

Raised in her family’s dollhouse museum, Birdie grew up surrounded by models of perfect daughters that she could never be, haunted by a father who refused to accept her and a mother who wouldn’t protect her. Birdie fled and didn’t look back.

A home, a girlfriend, a job—a summons to the House she left behind.

After ten years, Birdie returns to her mother’s welcoming arms, but something has changed in the centuries-old family home. Strange dogs hide in the foundations, her bedroom door locks on its own, her father won’t leave the basement—and something new and terrible lurks behind her mother’s eyes. She knows that she should leave, but eyes far older than the dolls’ have been watching her. 

The House allowed Birdie to escape once. It refuses to let her shame the family again.

BJS sat down with me, ECT, and here’s what we discussed…

House, Body, Bird, is a surreal journey into a dollhouse life in more than one way. Becoming small in front of your parents, or being made small by your parents; there is a lot to unpack here, in terms of sexuality, gender, family expectations and obligations, and more. Was all of this in the forefront as you wrote, or how much developed as you got into the story itself?

I was absolutely thinking about gender roles and familial obligations while I was writing. From early on, I knew Birdie’s bedroom should be filled with mid-century nuclear families living in suburbia, and I knew that all the dolls were glued in place. Dollhouses can be powerful creative toys for kids’ stories (my playtimes had a lot of kidnappings, demonic possessions, and secret romances, which is how we ended up with this book), but if children aren’t allowed to explore ideas through their own play, then the dollhouses might as well just be educational dioramas prescribing what the world should look like. Moms go in the kitchen, Dads go in the big armchair, and Kids go outside where they can’t bother anyone. Dolls become tools for social reproduction, even more so than they already are.

One thing that developed as I wrote was the attic filled with Barbie’s Dreamhouses, which became a refuge for Birdie as a child. The dolls there aren’t glued down specifically because Birdie’s father doesn’t care about them as much: in his view, Barbies are commercial, modern, and cheap, but also socially relevant to the tourist rabble, and therefore they have an out-of-the-way exhibit in the dollhouse museum. However, what her father denigrates, Birdie finds liberating. She creates a counter-cultural space within her family’s house, and while it isn’t the same as true freedom—she’s stuck in the attic, the literary prison for madwomen who can look at the horizon but never reach it—the Dreamhouses give her a place to be herself and therefore survive until she can escape.

Rigid ideas of gender, sexuality, and family create the impression of a scouring, inescapable light. But bright lights cast dark shadows, and houses have so many shadows to hide in—especially if you’re small.

“Houses and children are very alike—constructed…” Do Birdie’s parents have difficulty with her because they made her, but ultimately didn’t control her?

Short answer: Yes.

Longer answer: It’s not just that they couldn’t control Birdie. It’s also that recognizing and, crucially, accepting their lack of control over Birdie—accepting that Birdie deserves autonomy—would mean having to reckon with their own life histories. Birdie’s parents have both led lives of constant, unhappy compromise. Her father suffered physical and emotional abuse from his own parents, which he never got any kind of closure about, and her mother struggled with an authoritarian marriage that isolated her and eroded her goals, dreams, and even hobbies. If they realize that Birdie’s choices are legitimate, then they’d also have to question what different choices they could have made for themselves. What sort of people, parents or otherwise, could they have been if they tried to command their own happiness instead of someone else’s?

This story takes the haunted house trope and turns it on its head; Birdie’s father tells her “we build on what came before us.” Is every piece of land haunted, and thus every home haunted, be they dollhouse or otherwise?

I’m setting aside the question of whether or not paranormal entities exist, because the world is huge and strange and I’ve seen so little of it. Here’s my experience with hauntings: places become haunted from the stories we tell about them. That story can be as simple as, “this room has a weird vibe” or as complicated as the whole of American history.

At one point in House, Body, Bird, Birdie bumps against a model of the kitchen at Thomas Jefferson’s plantation, where enslaved chefs—including James Hemings, older brother to Sally Hemings—cooked meals for one of America’s most famous founding fathers. That detail is meant to remind the audience of all the stories erased or sanitized by neat encapsulations of history. Even if mainstream narratives don’t acknowledge them as much, they persist in archival materials, archaeological artifacts, and/or oral histories (and this isn’t even getting into all the hard work done to study, preserve, and publicize these stories in fiction and nonfiction spaces), much like ghosts persist just out of sight, asserting their continued existence, disturbing day-to-day operations. A ghost is a creature with unfinished business, and historical injustices are full of unfinished business; think of all the modern American ghost stories about Native American burial grounds. One reason hauntings disturb us is because they remind us that we’re connected to a wider spiral of history and everyone who once lived in it. To everyone who is still living, still carrying these stories, still seeking justice. And it’s good to be disturbed this way. We have responsibilities to the past and the future.

Hauntings also don’t have to be negative. A line in HBB that I’m proud of is, “Suffering is not the only ghost.” Love and joy leave their own traces, and telling stories about that warmth changes the mood of a place as well.

In conclusion, not every home is haunted. But with your help, they could be!

If you could build a dollhouse that was the home of a fictional character, whose would it be?

My first instinct is to name a character with a very cozy home, like Bilbo Baggins’ Bag-End or the Moomins’ Moominhouse, but I think then I’d spend a lot of time staring wistfully at them instead of writing. We also already have a clear idea of what these homes look like, so there wouldn’t be much invention involved. It would probably be more fun to create a dollhouse for a character whose home we never see so that we can speculate on the floor plan, furnishings, decor, etc. A “dollhouse as fan fiction” situation. And in that case, I’d choose Columbo. What color scheme did he and his wife pick out? How plush is the dog bed for Dog? And is he actually telling the truth about misplacing his pens? (No. They’re well-organized in this coffee mug.)

What did you discover during the writing that you had not planned for?

The biggest plot change that I made to the story was Birdie’s confession to Lila about her situation (i.e., honey, my parents shrunk me, and not in the fun family movie way). In the first draft, Birdie told Lila that she was in trouble and needed Lila to come get her—and that was it. I thought keeping Birdie’s transformation a secret from Lila would be more suspenseful and dramatic, but it didn’t sit right with me once I’d finished the scene. Birdie, who tried her best to keep Lila out of danger, was now deliberately withholding information that could protect Lila? Not to mention, Birdie’s character development involves her learning to open up to Lila, so failing to do so at such a pivotal moment would have been a real missed opportunity on my part. I think this is a version of Ursula Le Guin’s thoughts about artists mistakenly seeing pain as interesting and intellectual, while happiness is mundane and stupid. We may think that secrets and mystery make a relationship exciting, but really the everyday work of communication, of allowing ourselves to be known, is what creates a fun, loving, and worthwhile partnership (and talking to my partner is actually how I was able to figure out that the scene needed to be fixed in the first place!). I’m happy I got the chance to articulate that through Birdie and Lila.

Also, figuring out the architecture of the house to make the final action sequence work was a real bear. I looked at a lot of Victorian house floor plans, which were way too sensible for what I’d gotten myself into. I ended up drawing my own layout on an index card with a lot of scribbled-out sections and arrows tracking the movements of different characters. It’s still a little wonky, but the house itself is meant to be a series of ill-advised renovation projects, so it works.

Would you ever want to be made small to live in a dollhouse?

I live with an adorable house cat named Mochi who has highly-developed hunting instincts—so, no. I’ve seen what she does to her favorite stuffed raccoon. I would not survive. 

Reader, will you survive? We hope you do, because after the cover (here it comes), you get the all mighty preorder button. We hope you’ll grab an ebook or print copy of our final-for-the-moment print novella. Supporting small press is more vital every day in this oppressive world of ours.

Our cover for House, Body, Bird comes from the talented John G. Reinhart, whose art has graced From These Dark Abodes, One Message Remains, and Starstruck as well. The text design is by Christine M. Scott, with input from inkshark. It takes a village to build a haunted house.

The truly astonishing news is: you can add this book to YOUR shelf. You can possess and be possessed by House, Body, Bird. You can do it right now.

Thank you for loving the books we have published at Psychopomp. Thank you for supporting this final print edition! Will we ever return to the land of really cool print books? We sure do hope so. If you’d like to help that happen, buy this book! Support our quarterly fiction zine, The Deadlands! Every little bit helps—no matter how little you are, you can do the thing. House, Body, Bird proves it to be true!

What’s more, the technology that brought Inga to this distant colony—beaming her consciousness out of her original body and into a synthetic one—has misfired. There are haunting gaps in her memory, pieces of herself lost to the void. As extinction takes species after species, Inga and the people of Nordenmark must find a way to survive, and a reason to live, in the spaces death leaves behind.

K.L. Schroeder is a speculative fiction writer and microbiologist forged by the cold dark winters of Canada and Sweden. Their fiction can be found in the horror anthology Northern Nights, and climate fiction anthology And Lately, the Sun.

K.L. joined editor Nicasio Reed for a few quick questions about their upcoming novella, No One to Hold the Distant Dead.

A lot of science fiction about terraforming is especially interested in how that process begins—what a place looked like before, and how it’s changed into something different. What was your thought process in looking instead at, instead, the ending and failureof a terraforming process?

Well, I wanted to look at how we go on when it seems like our world is lost, and for me that meant that death and ending had to infuse everything in the story, including the setting.

The form it took was influenced a lot from the time I worked in veterinary microbiology and anatomy research, which are disciplines quite close with death compared to other science spaces. They lent themselves to the discussion of what we do when faced with an end. And they are also wildly fascinating places. There really was a very big preserved tapeworm in a jar with ‘YUM’ written on it.

I think it’s fair to say that everyone who reads Distant Dead falls a little in love with Hecate the lizard. But really, every animal we run into has a huge emotional punch for the reader and the characters. How did you choose which animals would be representative of Nordenmark’s ecosystem?

I pictured Nordenmark as having sort of a boreal forest vibe similar to what I’ve lived around in Sweden and Canada, so it’s populated with wildlife that you might find in those places on Earth. I’m not an ecologist, so there’s imagination involved here, but I chose keystone species like beavers and otters because they have very strong stabilizing relationships with their environments. Which could be helpful in a forest terraforming situation.

There’s maybe only the viviparous lizard that lives in the boreal forest, but the black velvet leopard gecko is so adorable and goth that surely centuries of adaptation would allow the Nordenmark damask lizard to diverge and live in the forest too :).

While this is a science fiction story, set on a distant planet, it feels so much like a climate fiction book in its ecological concerns and even in the small glimpses we get of what’s happened back on Earth. Are there authors or works of climate fiction that you’ve been influenced by?

Oh man, there are so many. Probably the first SF-climate fiction I was influenced by was An Annual Migration of Clouds by Premee Mohamed that I came across on CBC Books back when it first came out. I love Lorraine Wilson’s This is Our Undoing and We are all Ghosts in the Forest, Ray Nayler’s The Mountain in the Sea, and of course the solarpunk canon all the way back to Joan Slonczewski’s A Door into Ocean and Miyazaki’s Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind. I’m panicking now because there’s so many more I haven’t mentioned.

Francesco Verso gave a panel here a few years back where he said something to the effect of “Cyberpunk is the modus operandi, the world we live in. It has lost its power to critique the system. In exploring solutions, including people, and focusing on humanity, survival and community, solarpunk is best positioned to do this now,” and that really resonated with me. Don’t get me wrong, I love cyberpunk (not showing the picture of teenaged me wearing those circuitboard contact lenses), but stories like Nausicaä and all the others have left marks on my heart and brain that have been important particularly in the last years with gestures at everything. It’s an honour if you can see their influence in this story.

There are threads throughout the story about the connection between death and memory. What happens to grief when the memory of what’s lost fades or disappears, and if it’s worth preserving a facsimile of what’s been lost. Was this always something you wanted to explore, or did these themes emerge during the writing?

Both, I think. The seed of the story was thinking about what death folklores might look like for people who have left Earth—and of course goths in space—and then everything related to death or grief and memory and making sense of how it changes kind of developed during the writing. Which also involved things like haunting the death deity Wikipedia pages (Meng Po Soup!) and learning about Swedish funeral traditions (there really used to be candy!) and reading how people revisit memories in the digital age (looking at old houses on Google Maps like in Josh’s cover reveal!).

What did you learn from writing these characters that you didn’t expect?

It was easy to write characters being empathetic, but much more difficult to write them reaching a consensus when it came to remembrance. Even if death and loss are certain for humans, I found there are many different ways to think about it.

Do you think you’d be willing to get beamed across space into a new body?

Hell yes, that would be extremely cool. I mean, it would be difficult to explain it to my cats, but if I had fewer attachments on Earth I’d go in a heartbeat. Which is possibly an unsurprising answer from a knowledge-hungry scientist and immigrant who has launched themselves across the globe.

Lush, lyrical, and heartbreaking, No One to Hold the Distant Dead is fascinating science fiction as well as a moving elegy mourning lost selves, lost loves, and lost species. This story of a cosmic traveler grappling furiously with pain and sorrow offers us a grim sort of hope in the midst of despair.

— Ivy Grimes, author of Glass Stories

K.L. Schroeder strikes the perfect balance between hope and grief, exploring loss on both a personal and planetary scale. Beautifully written, gentle, and thought-provoking—overall, a stunning debut.

— A.C. Wise, author of Ballad of the Bone Road

Schroeder weaves together a visceral and timely tale of environmental collapse that pulls no punches about what’s coming. Heartfelt and infuriating at times, No One To Hold The Distant Dead leaves us with a realistic, but hopeful version of the future, one hovering somewhere between victory and defeat.

— A.D. Sui, author of The Dragonfly Gambit

“Beautiful and heartbreaking. It’s sadly rare to find an author like Schroeder who approaches the non-human with such compassion and respect. A must read.”

— Ever Dundas, author of Goblin and HellSans

Readers, we are pleased to present MMIX’s (Rust MacCarthy & L Faunt) artwork for the cover of No One to Hold the Distant Dead by K.L. Schroeder (design by Christine M. Scott).

This November, join Inga on a journey out of her planet and body, across the stars to a world where everything is possible, but Death yet lingers.

Today’s detour takes us into AFTERLIVES: The Year’s Best Death Fiction cover reveal. But…that sounds pretty Realm of the Dead, you are thinking. And you aren’t wrong, but look—not everything about death is grim. Sometimes, the Realm has beautiful things to show us. The end of suffering, the paths our ancestors took, the fragment of them that still lives within us.

And this is new! You haven’t seen this before, so here we are.

Curator Sheree Renée Thomas made you a beautiful table of contents, so we aimed to put as beautiful a cover on the book—and with her guidance, we think we achieved it. Nephthys, Egyptian goddess of the dead, has come to oversee this collection of fiction, rendered in hues of violet and ebony by Jeszika Le Vye.

Gaze upon her!

Stunning.

Let’s take another look at that TOC, too:

I. Breathing Beyond the Veil ( Death’s new robes…)
(These opening stories plunge us into surprising and startling transformations, explore the visceral, immediate shifts that redefine existence in new forms beyond what we think of as conventional, everyday life.)

“How To Get Away with Living” by Chisom Umeh (Sci-Fi, Nigerian, Ethics, Bureaucracy/Hustling Beyond the Grave?/Resurrection)
“Drinking Dead Brazilians” by Lia Mulcahy (Queer, Magical Realism, Afterlife, Liberation)
“Eyes Of My Brother” by Robert Luke Wilkins (African/Indigenous Inspired Folk Horror, Body Horror, Grief, Spiritual)

II. Threads of Memory (who are we here and beyond life, the enduring consciousness and challenge of being, existence)
(These stories explore how our consciousness, personal and cultural memory, and ancestral bonds kind of haunt of us, persist, shaping our identities and influencing the living from beyond the spectral veil)

“Labyrinth” by Beth Goder (Literary Speculative, Psychological Haunting, History, Memory)
“The Texture of Memory, of Light” by Samara Auman (Dystopian Sci-Fi, Memory, Grief, Social Commentary)
“A Proper Vessel, A Perfect House” by Ash Huang (Ancestral Dark Fantasy, Cultural, Possession)
“Not all your bones are yours” by Plangdi Neple (Afrofuturist Folk Horror, Body Horror, Atonement)
“Rooms of Our Own” by Toshiya Kamei (Digital Afterlife Sci-Fi, Grief, Ethics)
“The Lark Ascending” by Eleanna Castroianni (AI Sci-Fi, Memory, Consciousness, Legacy)

III. Beyond the Sacred Veil (stories that explore the rituals, ideas around justice, and the great grand design of life/death/afterlife)
(These stories are set in more diverse cultural spaces and offer other understandings of death, explore sacred rituals, engage with the idea of spiritual justice, and/or  explore how choices and actions may live on, requiring restoration or resolutions beyond even the grave.)

“Unquiet on The Eastern Front” by Wole Talabi (Historical Folk Horror, African, Colonialism)
“Raising an Ancestor” by Kay Mabasa (Cultural Fantasy, African, Ancestral Connection)
“When Rain Clouds Gather” by Rutendo Chidzodzo (Magical Realism, African, Justice)
“Onitsha Main, Ochanja, The Twins, Nkpor, and the Shadows of Shoprite” by Somto Ihezue (Magical Realism, Nigerian, Allegory)
“The Empty Throne” by Benjamin C. Kinney (Theological Speculative, Jewish-themed, Agency)
“The Colour of the Ninth Wave” by Katie McIvor (Historical Dark Fantasy, Irish Mythology, Justice)

IV. Celestial Dust & Mortal Wills (stories that confront the infinite, the end…)
(This section of stories confronts some of the broader cosmic implications of death, and/or  poignant encounters with cosmic forces beyond our comprehension.)

“Mister Yellow” by Christina Bauer (Cosmic Sci-Fi, Ethical, Reality, Destruction)
“At the End of Everything” by Spencer Nitkey (Existential Sci-Fi, Cosmic Decay, Oblivion)
“The Ghost Tenders of Chornobyl” by Nika Murphy (Historical Supernatural, Ukrainian, Trauma, Healing)
“Twice Every Day Returning” by Sonya Taaffe (Lyrical Magical Realism, Queer, Cultural, Grief)

V. The Heart’s Persistent Song (works that focus on purpose, acceptance, and those final, lasting echoes of life)
(These final stories anchor the collection with themes of finding new purpose in the afterlife, achieving a meaningful, emotional acceptance of loss, and/or the enduring, transformative nature of love and unique identity.)

“Leak” by Maria Hossain (Revenant Horror, Environmental Justice, Social Commentary)
“A Tapestry of Dreams” by Victor Forna (Magical Realism, African, Healing, Choice)
“The Eleventh Three-Quarters Hour” by Leslie What (Magical Realism, Grief, Bureaucracy, Haunting)
“What It Means to Drift” by Rajeev Prasad (Sci-Fi, Identity, Emotion, AI, Grief, Purpose, Self-acceptance)
“A Late Appearance by Death” by Victoria Brun (Literary Speculative, Compassion, Purpose)
“Fat Kids” by Alex Jennings (Magical Realism, African Diaspora, Identity, Self-acceptance)

The best news? Join our Patreon at any paid level, and get the AFTERLIVES: The Year’s Best Death Fiction 2024 ebook free. The book will be delivered to all patrons in November December.

Is the mind behind reality your own consciousness, that hermit sea trapped behind the rocky shore of your skull? Or is this mind not even your own? Is the puppet master a dull godhead birthing all things that live and die without ever knowing their true parentage? Is it some madman’s dream? Certainly would make sense these days. Such a mind, in all its massive responsibility, can only be insane. Sutter Cane declares he is this mind and he is indeed mad. And you will be, too, once you get stuck In The Mouth…

The thin membrane that peels off the plot, like shedding skin, is a late twentieth century neo-noir, which calls to mind Dan O’Bannon’s The Resurrected. John Trent is offered as a protagonist who is above it all. He sees most of human behavior as lies beguiling a scummy truth. As he investigates the mystery of the missing horror author, Trent regards himself as perfectly detached. Self-satisfied with his alienation, he denies himself any interconnectedness. Trent’s native New Yorkerness is an interesting detail; he feels at home in the heaving superorganism of the urban environment, surrounded by people he ultimately finds repulsive and untrustworthy. This sets him up for a gnosis only Weird Horror can offer.

The book’s first act shines in the disgustingly mundane: the filthy asylum and its shoddy management, streetside civilians startled from their apathy by an axe-murderer, Trent’s time-loop on the subway, first with people then with things. Cane paints the world as a monstrous carnival long before the teratological freaks flash their malformed fangs. He also does a great job populating this world. The day players engage Trent with enough credibility in their lives outside of the interactions. Cane generates a whole world this way; there’s a lot of color to the third-person omniscience. Little jokes pepper the atmosphere, alleviating the tension, then scatter like frightened fish when the terror takes off.

The descriptions are very grounded. The beasts are vivid with leering grins, crackly bones, and of course lots and lots of tentacles. The action sequences are well paced; you always know where the characters reside within the motion. Once reality starts melting, the reader must trust Cane to guide us through the fetid liquid. And he proves a most loquacious Virgil. In another stunning choice, Cane actually provides first person narration as himself. It feels like Cane has pulled up a chair at the table where I was reading alone. And I alone can see him. Yet he sees all of us. He sees you.

Trent’s reply came, low and bitter. “God’s not supposed to be a hack horror writer.”
Cane smiled. “I love that line, a bit of self-depreciation on my part.”

The book mocks itself, trafficking in lurid mutations while having Trent criticize them as cheap fakery, not just within the narrative but in the meta-dialogue about horror schlock at large. This mass entertainment, which you the reader currently consume, is warping your delicate sensibility, and you won’t care when you are finally swallowed whole.

The concrete horror reaches its apex halfway through the plot then recedes, like a dark tide, leaving the reader in the fishy stink of reality. It is once Trent is allowed to escape Hobb’s End that a deeper horror is unearthed. He wanders back into his familiar world, the hazy shadow of his experience dogging his every step. Trent’s conflict is not fisticuffs with mutated townsfolk, but with the violation of his waking mind as he attempts to resolve his impossible experience within a cozy framework of reason. That’s when the book’s true tension winds up, in the lockstep of John’s teetering doom.

The finest moment of cosmic horror is reserved for the climax of the Old Ones’ becoming. Cane never uses their names, but that’s certainly what they are. There’s even a deviously sneaky “Arkham” reference slipped in near the end; see if you’ve the eyes to clock it. I won’t give away the ending, but it’s simply stunning. Feels like the book has pulled the reader round and round a swirling drain, and at the end we vanish from sight never to emerge again. The Final Word elevates the book to the height of Weird Meta-Horror. You will have to see it for yourself.

The horror follows you. The thing about reality is you can compartmentalize it. I see with these eyes in the car, those eyes at the office, and a third pair at home. I see friends, family, neighbors, tense & terse interactions each performed by a discordant variation of my mind. Like melodies emerging at their designated rhythm, my patterns were preset, comfortable, normal. Now they are not.

I’ve been getting headaches since I finished reading. I only feel better at night. The moonlight sharpens my vision. In the pale glow, skin becomes waxy and smooth, as if the whole world were populated by candle-folk. It would be dazzling to watch them burn and melt. My gums are bruised. I’m spitting out teeth. I can see the fangs coming in at random.

Now all the waxy skin looks tasty, like flesh covered in maggots. Want to use the fangs. Carrion feast for the senses. I can feel the mind behind reality, its thoughts popping like bubbles in curdled milk. Prodding me. It is not mine. It’s moving my tubes, blowing cold air through the pipes in my organs, remaking me into an instrument for him.

Dizzy. Nausea. Dreams in the daytime. I remember when I still had dreams of my own. I’m having trouble picturing my father’s face. It must have existed, since I exist. I have to have a father. His blue eyes, cold in the dying sunlight. His narrow face and wild steel-gray hair. My father. The mind behind me. What was his name? Kane? Cane?

I stare at my face in the mirror and know that something is off. I didn’t always have blue eyes; I know that FOR SURE. My eyes are brown, so why does a stranger in the mirror stare back with those icy azure irises? The nausea, the dreams, the growing pains. Long fangs sinking into tender waxy flesh…

The worst part is that the book didn’t cause this; it brought my attention to it. It was always here. I was always becoming, I just didn’t have eyes to see. I was another cave fish skulking about in the pond scum like the rest of you. And now new eyes have sprouted from the benign flesh of my smooth forehead. Sutter Cane isn’t even solving anything. He’s just lifting a finger and pointing at the rip in the sky. My new eyes follow, and I can finally see what is pouring through.

A writer is a person whose book is true to them. That’s what makes a powerful read. Sutter Cane is deceptively simple. You think he’s just taking another ride around the cul-de-sac of genre, letting you gawk at papier-mâché monsters, but no. The trick the author pulls is devious. The circus ends, but you find yourself still strapped to your seat. The show never ends, but you’re finally aware of it. You wake up as one of Thomas Ligotti’s clown puppets. And there’s Sutter Cane behind you, tugging the strings like a cruel child.

It’s all so baroque, but don’t you love a good old-fashioned spookfest? The claws. The tentacles. The colours shedding off like snakeskin in the waxing moonlight. I’m a cosmic giggle of sardonic delight wrenched from his throat. I’m spit in the wind from his mouth. Can you see me? I can see you. So can he. It’s a fun book. I encourage you to read it.

The mouth opens this Halloween.

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ABOVE ALL,
LET YOUR BONES FROLICK!

Manusos’s poetic and emotional writing brings poignancy to this story of people who have lost everything, including the knowledge of what they lost. The result is twisty, complex, and rewarding speculative fiction.

Publishers Weekly Review

FROM THESE DARK ABODES is an intricately crafted labyrinth with hidden spaces in between that weaves together decadent body horror, complex relationships—intimate like hugging bones, exposed like peeled back skin—told through prose with an intoxicating atmospheric pull, crawling with sensory details.

Ai Jiang, Hugo, Nebula, Bram Stoker Award nominated author of LINGHUN and I AM AI

FROM THESE DARK ABODES clawed my heart open and brought the sinew and sharp needle to sew it closed again. From Lethe’s fathomless longing to Petunia’s claustrophobic, crushed-down postpartum existence, this novella felt terribly human–filled with all the ways we hurt and help each other.

Aimee Ogden, author of Nebula Award Finalist SUN-DAUGHTERS, SEA-DAUGHTERS

Both mysterious and intimate, From These Dark Abodes will enthrall you and make you fall in love with all the charming imperfections of humanity.

Eugenia Triantafyllou, author of Six Versions of My Brother Found Under the Bridge

From These Dark Abodes is a wonderfully dark page-turner overflowing with fairytale-like dread. Much like the revelers of St. Edah’s who strip themselves of flesh to unsheathe their gilded bones, this novella continually changes shape until it reveals its vulnerable center in its final pages. A tender triumph about grief, memory, and elusive self-acceptance, as well as a masterful myth-mystery you’ll want to reread once you reach the end.

Thomas Ha, Nebula, Locus, and Shirley Jackson-Nominated Author

Dreamy and evocative, From These Dark Abodes is a novella suffused with longing that explores the meaning of life through the specter of death.

A.C. Wise, author of The Ghost Sequences

This is a sometime place, not an all the time place…

Summer 1981: Brady’s grandmother vanishes—along with an entire West Texas town. There’s no explanation, except those that don’t hold any logic. Brady doesn’t worry too much about that, having spent his childhood listening to his grandmother’s stories and playing with the pencil-sketched ghosts in her old Victorian: the young Shirley, the injured cowboy Glen, and others.

People slipping away into another world is fantasy. It’s impossible.

Summer 2025: Brady returns to his grandmother’s house, hoping to understand what happened, and to find out exactly where his grandmother went. Brady holds a hope close to his heart: That he can duplicate whatever magic his grandmother conjured, to follow in her footsteps as his own ghost-tattered life comes to its close.

I was there. I know what I saw…

This is a sometime place…not an all the time place… You have to grab it while it’s here. Josh Rountree took the time to answer some questions from editor E. Catherine Tobler about his novella, Summer in the House of the Departed!

Your work often has a touch of melancholy and memory in it, but Summer in the House of the Departed takes it to a new depth, showing how one’s unresolved childhood trauma can influence one’s future. Talk to us about where this one came from.

While this book is entirely fiction, I used quite a few of my actual memories to set the tone and bring the early section alive. My grandmother was a ghost researcher in the late seventies/early eighties, and I recall fondly listening to her stories, looking at her spooky photographs, and listening to recording of ghosts laughing and jumping on beds.

People would seek her out to share their tales, and she was always happy to engage, whether that meant visiting them to experience any phenomena, or lending advice. She always talked about gathering all her stories together and writing a book, but she passed away when I was a teenager. For a long time, I considered assembling these in some volume of West Texas ghost stories, but since I’m a fiction writer, I decided to use several of the stories she told me in this novella instead.

Brady, the narrator of this story, is eight years old in 1981, the same age I was at that time.  I did my best to remember those days, and my grandmother, and to fuel the story with that sense of time and place. Of course, our memories of so long ago are colored by time and by what others have told us. Certainly, this is not a real representation of my young self, or my grandmother, but it feels real to me.

Do you have a favorite scene in this book?

Any of the scenes where Granny is telling stories to Brady, particularly the scene where they are seated on the front porch, whiling away the evening. I have fond memories of that sort of interaction. Sitting at a table with my grandmother as she dug through reams of paperwork, shoved aside stacks of cassettes, flipped through photographs, wondering aloud which ones were okay to show me and which ones she might best save for when I was older. She could tell how interested I was in the stuff, and I credit that as a big reason I write horror today. But there are some things you can show a kid, and some things you can’t, and as creepy as some of those photos were, I’ll always wonder about the ones I never got to see.

Have you ever known a haunted house?

Pretty sure our old house in north Austin was haunted. We built it new in the nineties, but the land must have had some memories it still wanted to share. We would occasionally see shadowy figures moving through the house, and find inanimate objects had moved around during our absence. My youngest child, then only two, would ask who those “men” or “angels” where who passed through without our notice.

Our home was happy but certain rooms had a heavy vibe. Guests would comment, and animals would react furiously at times, clawing and howling at things the rest of us couldn’t see. One night, when my youngest son was a baby, I went downstairs to warm up a bottle.  The vibe was so dark and heavy, I felt like a kid afraid of the dark. I warmed the bottle in a hurry, and literally ran back up the stairs, feeling something at my heels. As it turns out, my wife had the exact same experience that night, when she had to go downstairs.

This vibe eventually moved to my oldest son’s room, where guests would stay. They all complained about the heaviness and the creepiness during the night, as compared to the rest of the house. Eventually, my wife walked determinedly into the room, and had a conversation with whatever was haunting us, asking it to leave our kid’s room alone. And after that, we never experienced anything again.

This story captures the magic of places that are not our own, but almost ours—a grandparents’ house. My grandmother also had a den, filled with a piano, a turntable, a fireplace, chairs that are now my own, and a seemingly endless bookcase. Did your childhood contain a magic place?

I grew up in a small town where both sets of grandparents lived, and both of their houses were fantastic getaways from regular life where I always loved to visit.

The grandmother remembered in this story lived on a farm, outside of town.  When I was very young, there were always cows and pigs, and chickens would chase me through the yard. All surrounded by barb wire fences and endless cotton fields. The land was hot and dusty and unnervingly flat for those not used to it.

Their house was a sixties ranch with wood paneling and blue shag carpet, and all the appliances in the kitchen were turquoise.  The bookshelves were filled with western paperbacks, ’70s new age books about crystal skulls and alien abductions, many volumes of folklore, and popular ghost books of the time like The Amityville Horror.

Most of the more esoteric books referenced in the novella weren’t actually on my grandparents’ shelves, but all these books and more fed into the vibe of this book. And though very different from the haunted house of my novella, my grandparents’ house remains close and familiar, and provided a strong inspiration for the feel of the house created for the book.

What was the hardest bit of Summer in the House of the Departed to write and how did you get through it?

I think the second half of the book, where Brady is older and facing his own mortality, was quite a bit harder to write. During the first half, Granny is there as a source of mystery, but also as a source of positivity and hope in the face of what she’s enduring. But in the second section, Brady is largely alone with his ghosts, and it was harder to find that positive light that I wanted to remain consistent throughout the story. In some way, I think of the first half as magical and the second half as hard reality, but of course magic creeps into Brady’s adult life too.

Summer in the House of the Departed is a story that Ray Bradbury might have written. What are your favorite Bradburian stories (not necessarily by Bradbury!)?

While I love all of Bradbury’s work, I have always gravitated to his dark fantasy stories over his science fiction. And, as it happens, my first exposure to Bradbury came from books on the shelf at my grandmother’s house.

Far and away, my favorite Bradbury is Something Wicked This Way Comes.  I read it pretty much every October, and it stays forever fresh. I reference that book in this novella, and I borrow its elegiac sense of aging, facing death, and coming of age in the face of terrible truths. The boy in my story, like Will Halloway and Jim Nightshade, is at an age where you think you might live forever. And when the world tells you otherwise, it can be a difficult burden to bear.

The cover for Josh’s novella was a true labor of love. Artist inkshark tells the tale:

I love painting creaky old houses, especially haunted ones. Mr. Rountree had some photographs of a Zillow listing that my imagination insisted must be haunted, so I began sketching, sometimes directly over the photos using my monitor as a lightbox, and I also began reading. At first I gravitated toward night scenery, while I was putting ink washes onto physical paper, but the more of Summer in the House of the Departed I read, the more I realized the painting should promise more nuance and subtlety, to match the prose and the vibe.

When I switched to painting on details digitally, I aimed for it to feel more like the time I spent as a kid on my uncle’s lonely ranch: musty old rooms and beams of sunlight sparkling with dust motes, a coveted full can of Dr. Pepper all to myself while I perched in the too-bright front yard.

Here are some of the stages—you can see how I moved away from cold moonlight and toward warm yellows, browns, and greens:

When I had nearly finished, I looked up the address to Mr. Rountree’s sample house using Street View, and found that since we had saved those reference photos, it had been demolished. I’d been painting not just human spirits, but a house that was itself a ghost. All that remained were photos and this painting.

An actual ghost house for the cover—you can’t get much more perfect than that. So without further ado, you’ve been so patient, here’s the final cover, with art by inkshark, and design by Christine M. Scott.

Summer in the House of the Departed can be yours on August 26th. You can preorder now, using the handy dandy little gold button right here. You can also read the first chapter and enter Brady’s ghost-drenched world for yourself. You deserve a treat.

Josh Rountree is a Texas novelist and short story writer. His novel, The Legend of Charlie Fish, was released by Tachyon Publications in 2023 to wide acclaim, making the Locus Recommended Reading List, and being named one of Los Angeles Public Library’s best books of the year. A followup, The Unkillable Frank Lightning, was published earlier this summer. Rountree lives in Austin with his lovely wife of many years, and a pair of half-feral dogs who demand his obedience.

For now, read on.

The summer my grandmother disappeared, taking an entire Texas town with her, she showed me photos of her ghosts.

She placed the photos on the kitchen counter, snapping each one against the shell-pink Formica like playing cards. Some of the more interesting ones she tapped with her finger to make sure I took special notice. “That one there was taken out near Sterling City.”

“You took it?”

“No, a woman lives there took it. Sent it to me.”

It was a Polaroid with Thanksgiving 1978 written along the bottom. A little girl with a long-sleeve shirt and blue jeans tucked into red cowboy boots sat in a high-backed wicker chair, laughing, and pointing back at the camera. Blue light blossomed out from behind the chair in a vaguely humanoid shape, and two tendrils wrapped around the girl like transparent arms, giving her a hug.

“Lady who sent this say the girl is her daughter, and the ghost is her late mother.. She died that summer before. The old woman used to favor that chair. Her ghost started making a whole lot of racket around the house anytime somebody sat in it. This was a few years back, so might be she’s moved along by now.”

“What kind of racket?”

“Oh, just knocking on walls and stomping around. I recorded it. It’s on one of my cassettes.”

I wasn’t sure I wanted to hear it. The thought of dying and being bound to the real world while everyone carried on around you was more frightening to me than the ghosts themselves. If I had to die, I figured I’d rather go someplace else.

Granny filled an ashtray full of lipstick-stained cigarette butts while we talked our way through her stack of photos. Some she’d taken herself, others she’d received from people familiar with her reputation. Most of the photos showed smiling people with circular splotches above their heads, or streaks of light cutting across the image. Maybe the camera captured a bug. Maybe it was a trick of the light. Others were harder to explain, like the crying woman floating above a glassy lake, draped in a long white dress, arms outstretched.

Granny put down a second photo of the same floating woman, same position, like it was taken immediately after the first, except this time the woman’s dress was stained a deep red and she had the head of a horse. Her body was soft around the edges, like the camera had moved before the image could resolve.

“This one shows La Llorona. You remember the story I told you?”

“Yes, I know that one.” I stared at the picture. The horse woman’s lips were curled back around her flat teeth in a way that made it look like she was smiling.

“Might not ought to show you some of these.”

“Why not?”

“They’re liable to keep you up with nightmares.”

“Can I see the ones they took here?”

“Let’s save those for another time.”

Various people had taken photos in Granny’s house, both before and after she moved here, and she kept them in a cigar box in her desk, stacks of them bound with rubber bands. She’d always been happy to show me the rest of her photo collection, no matter how terrifying, but so far, she’d never been inclined to show me those in the cigar box.

I wasn’t sure why she thought they would frighten me more than the others. More than her house itself.

The place was thoroughly haunted.

That’s why she’d moved there in the first place.

Ghosts bled out from the margins of that old house, and I made friends with a few of them. Like thin gray memories they clung to the undersides of coffee tables and dwelled in the narrow space between the guest bed and the wall. In the nighttime, I’d peer over the edge of the mattress at their dull forms and whisper my secrets to them. They wouldn’t respond, but I judged their interest in the way their eyes never wavered from mine.

In the daylight they were like half-erased pencil marks against the windows and the walls, often escaping notice and more easily forgotten, but still grasping at whatever reality they called their own.

Among my favorites was the ghost of a girl about my age whom I’d decided to call Shirley. She wore an old-style dress I couldn’t place in time, and she lingered at my grandmother’s bookshelves, drawing the outline of her fingertips across the spines of the books. The raspy sound of her fingers running against the paperbacks was the only noise she ever made. When she settled on one, I’d read it aloud to her. Frequently it would be We Have Always Lived in the Castle, but today it was Something Wicked This Way Comes, and I believe she picked this one because I’d told her it was my favorite.

We passed most mornings this way, me a pudgy boy in beat-up tennis shoes and brown corduroys, my hair buzzed down in what they used to call a summer cut, and her, little more than a silver outline of the person she used to be, but with blue eyes that had never entirely released their hold on life.

My grandmother often watched us from the doorway; Granny was wraith-thin and hollowed by cancer, a wreath of cigarette smoke spinning over her head. She was only in her mid-fifties, which seemed appropriately old for a grandparent when I was eight, but shockingly young now that I’m chasing that age myself.

One morning, my grandmother’s research assistant arrived wearing loose jeans and a blouse, lugging a legal box full of paperwork, blonde hair knotted up on top of her head and sunglasses sliding down the end of her nose. Beverly was an English major at Angelo State with an eye toward folklore and the supernatural, and her whirlwind arrival blew the ghosts to hidden corners of the house. I’d learned the summer before that despite her interest in ghosts, Beverly couldn’t see the ones living here. She struck me as too energetic, too alive for the ghosts to reveal themselves.

I wasn’t sure what that said about me.

“Hey kid, what are you reading?” Beverly sat the box on the table and gave me a hug. I showed her the paperback in my hand. “I like that one,” she said. “But I like his science fiction stuff better.”

My grandmother greeted Beverly wearing an orange polyester pantsuit and the wig she wore whenever we left the house, or when company called. She dug through the papers Beverly had brought, turquoise bracelets clattering together on her wrists. She clenched a lit cigarette between her teeth when she spoke. “Any accounts here from primary sources?”

Beverly settled into a chair at the dining room table, where my grandmother had already spilled the paperwork across the surface in untidy stacks. “Not much. Nothing that would be new to you, anyway. But there’s some good general info about the time period, and a lot of quotable speculation over the years of what CROATOAN might mean.”

“Thank you, honey. Looks like some good stuff.”

“I also found some stories I don’t think you’ve referenced yet that might add color and corroboration. Small towns in California and Ohio that disappeared around the turn of the century. And this one here in Kansas, back in the fifties.”

Beverly slid a paper-clipped bundle of materials toward my grandmother.

“You’re talking about Ashley, Kansas?”

“Yes. Earthquake, fire from the sky. A lot of creepy calls to the cops about the dead coming back for a visit. And then everybody in the whole town just disappeared. There are a couple of phone numbers written down there. People who lived nearby when it happened. I got a hold of them, and they’re willing to talk to you.”

“This is good work. I’ve heard that story before, but nothing as detailed as this.”

“There’s talk of a hole in the sky,” said Beverly. “Maybe it connects to another dimension? That supports a scientific answer to this mystery, don’t you think?”

“Might be it does,” said my grandmother. “Either way, it’s interesting.”

I huddled underneath the table like one of the ghosts, hungry for scraps. I often learned more about what Beverly and my grandmother were researching when they forgot I was there. Shirley attached herself to the underside of the table too, a swirling mass with shining eyes, head cocked to the side like she was listening. We lazed there together, lulled half asleep by the heat and their voices.

“Another universe bumping up against this one is the only rational explanation, isn’t it?” Beverly took a seat at the table and tapped her shoe nervously against the floorboards. Shirley drifted close, grasped at the cuff of Beverly’s blue jeans with smoky fingers. Shirley had that dusty, moldering smell that many of us associate with long afternoons spent digging through forgotten bookstores, and I would carry that with me through life as the scent of my grandmother’s house.

“Why do you assume there’s a rational explanation?” my grandmother asked.

“There has to be, right?”

“There has to be an explanation,” my grandmother said, “but no reason it has to be rational.”

Granny wrote nonfiction books about the supernatural, and her latest project was about the Roanoke colony. I’d read about what happened there. As soon as I was old enough to sound out words, my grandmother loaded me down with books about aliens, bigfoot, ghosts, trolls living under bridges, portals to fairy kingdoms, doomsday cults, and by comparison, more prosaic mysteries like the story of Roanoke. I knew Roanoke was a colony of early American settlers who had disappeared in the late fifteen hundreds, leaving no clue to where they’d gone, except the word CROATOAN cut into the bark of a tree. Most historians figured they’d either been killed by natives or assimilated into one of their tribes, but such an enduring mystery was bound to elicit supernatural speculation as well.

I peered out from underneath the table, spying on them like another forgotten ghost.

“If you throw out science, how can you hope to figure all this out?” said Beverly. “That’s crazy, right?”

Before Granny moved here, before she got sick, she taught high school. English 101. Both levels of Spanish. She was accustomed to questions and reveled in learning. So, she accepted Beverly’s challenge in the spirit it was intended.

Granny smiled, struggled with the striker on her lighter as she started another cigarette.

“I don’t throw out science, honey,” she said. “And I don’t doubt there’s some rational outcome for what’s going on that you’d accept in those terms, if you had a textbook in your hands that codified it. But that won’t ever happen. Science won’t provide you that answer. You know why? Science is too proud. Science won’t dig deep enough. I’ve read reams of evidence on the supernatural, including your good work here. Testimonials by credible folks with no reason to lie. Photos. Recordings. Objectively provable psychic phenomena. Do scientists consider these things? Not many of them. Not if they value their reputation. No quicker way to get shunned by academia than admit you believe in ghosts and goblins. And that’s a shame. Because science is supposed to consider all evidence, isn’t it? How accurate can your finding be on a matter if you pretend a good bulk of evidence just doesn’t exist?”

“I don’t know,” said Beverly.

“Well, they don’t either. What I’m saying, girl, is all that stuff we call the supernatural is a natural part of science. You just can’t study it under a microscope or swirl it around in a test tube.”

“You know I love folklore,” said Beverly. “Stories. But there must be some real-world answer for these sorts of disappearances, right? These people aren’t being stolen away by fairies.”

“You’re sure of that?”

Beverly grinned, chewed at her bottom lip as she tried to figure out if Granny was joking. Tried to ready some sort of logical argument if she wasn’t. The genuine delight on her face, and the way she drew her hair back through her fingers when she was thinking intently, made something flutter in my stomach. She smelled like coconut shampoo and sunshine. Like she lived on a tropical beach and not in the same forsaken land as the rest of us. Beverly belonged someplace else. Someplace better. She was beautiful, and I suppose I had a crush on her, but my eight-year-old self wouldn’t have understood it in those terms.

“You know I’ve experienced things too?” said Granny. “Not to mention there’s ghosts all over this house. Brady here sees them. Don’t you?”

Blood rushed to my face, and I nodded. Beverly gave me an appraising look, like she wasn’t sure what planet I’d materialized from.

“You’ve told me all the stories, Mrs. Edwards.”

“They’re more than stories,” said Granny.

“Sorry, that’s not what I meant. I believe all this stuff is happening, but there’s just…” Beverly trailed off, absently flipped through a few of the pages on the tabletop, as if the secrets of the universe might suddenly reveal themselves.

“Uh huh,” said Granny. “That’s where we get caught up, isn’t it? Just. That’s where our strictly materialist view of the universe falls apart.”

“I just need something to hold on to,” said Beverly.

“That’s the trick, ain’t it?”

Shirley drifted from underneath the table like silver smoke, her swirling surface capturing sunlight from another world. Her smile was mischief, and her eyes burned blue. She wanted me to follow. Shirley was restless; she never liked to remain in one place for long unless she was listening to me read. Books always calmed her. Rooted her in the world. I was the same way. I could burn away long hours without moving, so long as there were other places for me to visit in the pages of a book.

Never squirming, never impatient.

Other places always seemed better than wherever I was.

The flavor of conversation between Granny and Beverly was the same as always, so when Shirley issued the call to adventure, I followed. Crawled on all fours like a coyote sniffing at her trail. She moved across the kitchen linoleum like fog creeping across the face of the world, escaped the room and advanced down the hallway. Moving, eventually, under the closed door that led into Granny’s den. My bare hands and feet slapped against the floorboards as I followed. The wood was stained with something dark, and smelled like animals had lived here long ago.

A ghost I’d named Glen waited at the doorway. Might be he was standing guard, but I couldn’t know his motives. I wasn’t allowed in Granny’s den alone. But I was determined to follow Shirley, find out what she was up to. Glen was the ghost of an old cowboy with a crushed and weathered hat; he was nothing but bones inside his musty suit. Sometimes he wore a drawn, fretful face, wrinkled and ashen, but today he revealed only his gray, pitted skull, half his teeth fallen out and cracks radiating out from one eye socket like rays from the noonday sun. Shadows ruled the hallway, and he drew form from the darkness, appearing almost substantial. His jaw opened and closed with a sound like a cinder block dragging over concrete. Whatever he wanted to say, I wasn’t listening. I reached through him, turned the glass-handled doorknob, and proceeded into the den.

The room Granny called her den was a study, just off the hallway near the front entrance to the house. A cracked brick fireplace dominated one wall, mouth black and choking out the old scent of mesquite ash. Bookshelves crowded the other walls, overflowing with titles like The Kybalion. The Secret Teachings of All Ages. The Book of Lies. All manner of seductive-sounding volumes that drew my young self in like bugs to the porch lights. I had free run of Granny’s bookshelves, apart from those in her den. I would not read these books until much later, when I was older, and seeking insight into my grandmother’s thinking, there at the end of her life. I can’t say it made much of a difference. Questing for any true answer was folly, though it took me decades to learn that.

Stuffed in with the books were file folders and yellow notebooks full of Granny’s neat handwriting. Stacks of generic white cassette tapes with labels like Little Girl Ghost, Jumping on Bed. Snyder, TX 1972 and Interview #2 with Mrs. Mabel Starch / Plainview Prairie Beast Encounter. Melted candles and grinning crystal skulls. Wooden boxes carved with smiling suns and sleeping moons. Shirley rested a hand on top of one of those boxes, smiling dreamily. Her intention clear. Summer sunlight tried to intrude through the room’s lone window, but tan lace curtains and layers of West Texas dust held it at bay. What light existed in the room was golden and soft. Ghost light. Perfect shading for Shirley to take form. Unseen winds pulled at her calico dress. Her fingers clutched at the box, like she was trying to lift it herself. I didn’t question her. I met her hopeful stare and nodded. Snatched the box from the shelf and held it in my tiny hands.

I climbed into the swivel chair at Granny’s big oak desk, sat the box on top, careful not to disturb anything. Not to leave evidence of my trespass. The desk was littered with scraps of paper, mostly letters from people who sought out my grandmother for her advice on the supernatural. A few photos lay scattered about. Blurry images of supposed ghosts, and one that looked like a canine jowl streaking red through thick sagebrush. That one was paper clipped to a handwritten note claiming an encounter with the Chupacabra.

Normally these photos would have drawn me in; they weren’t among those Granny had shown me before. But the wooden box held the promise of unknown treasure, and Shirley clung cold against my back, obviously eager for me to open it. When I did, I found more photos. A couple dozen of them, bound in a fat rubber band. Every one of them taken inside Granny’s house. I heard that cinder-block scrape again, and realized Glen had joined us. He stood right behind me, snared by the same curiosity that held Shirley. The same curiosity that held me.

I fumbled off the rubber band. Laid the photos out.

The shooting locations were instantly recognizable. Granny’s upstairs bedroom. The kitchen, in the corner where the wobbly breakfast table stood. The formal living room, in front of the great brick fireplace. Even a few in the bathroom. Every photo taken right here in Granny’s house; every photo filled with ghostly apparitions. None of the ghosts appeared on film as clearly as they did to my waking eyes, but a few were substantial enough that I recognized them as my friends. One photo captured the old woman I’d named Lady Pecan Tree, standing beside the bed in my room, staring out the dormer window as was her habit. Blue and shimmery and transparent. Another photo showed Glen in the front living room, worn hat tipped forward to cover most of his missing face. Ephemeral hands locked together in worry. I kept flipping through the photos, found one of myself, very much alive, standing in front the towering bookshelves in the library. Some of the photos were older, but Granny took this one. Shirley stood beside me, both of us staring at the camera, like we were posing together. And I suppose we were. Shirley and I were fast friends, no matter the distance that separated us. No matter how much she wished me dead, so we might play and read together for eternity.

The ghosts at my back remained cold and still.

None of these photos were remotely frightening, and as I continued to examine them, I wondered why Granny held this particular batch in reserve.

Then I came to the last photo in the pile.

It was taken in the entryway, the camera eye facing the front door. A stained glass window dominated the top half of the door; it showed a stylized reproduction of an old-time cattle drive, beeves lumbering across the vanished prairie, cowboys on horseback, herding them ever onward. Sunlight stampeded through the glass, spilling reds and greens and golds across the floor and the walls. Bathed in that sunlight was the ghost of a man, arms crossed and grinning. So striking was the image, that if not for the way the sunlight passed through him, I might have mistaken him for a visitor to the house, waiting by the door to leave. He wore a pair of green coveralls, pants legs tucked into tall boots. His gray hair was thin and neatly combed, and a few days’ worth of stubble grew on his chin. His green eyes shone with otherworldly light. They stared at the camera. Stared at the photographer. Stared at me.

It was my grandfather.

Five years dead.

Granny, it seemed, had good reason for her secrets.

SUMMER IN THE HOUSE OF THE DEPARTED, the new novella from Josh Rountree.

Sheree says:

I created several anthologies based on the works that I kept returning to, as so many of the pieces…were truly impactful. It is my hope that readers will think about the afterlife—which is to say, our present lives—with eyes more turned to the magical potential and the importance of each moment. This Afterlives collection has some very powerful, gifted voices that explore liminal spaces, the veil between this world and the possible next (next, next?).

Without further ado, please look upon this finely crafted table of contents. The authors of Afterlives 2024: The Year’s Best Death Fiction are:

I. Breathing Beyond the Veil ( Death’s new robes…)

(These opening stories plunge us into surprising and startling transformations, explore the visceral, immediate shifts that redefine existence in new forms beyond what we think of as conventional, everyday life.)

• “How To Get Away with Living” by Chisom Umeh (Sci-Fi, Nigerian, Ethics, Bureaucracy/Hustling Beyond the Grave?/Resurrection)
• “Drinking Dead Brazilians” by Lia Mulcahy (Queer, Magical Realism, Afterlife, Liberation)
• “Eyes Of My Brother” by Robert Luke Wilkins (African/Indigenous Inspired Folk Horror, Body Horror, Grief, Spiritual)

II. Threads of Memory (who are we here and beyond life, the enduring consciousness and challenge of being, existence)

(These stories explore how our consciousness, personal and cultural memory, and ancestral bonds kind of haunt of us, persist, shaping our identities and influencing the living from beyond the spectral veil)

• “Labyrinth” by Beth Goder (Literary Speculative, Psychological Haunting, History, Memory)
• “The Texture of Memory, of Light” by Samara Auman (Dystopian Sci-Fi, Memory, Grief, Social Commentary)
• “A Proper Vessel, A Perfect House” by Ash Huang (Ancestral Dark Fantasy, Cultural, Possession)
• “Not all your bones are yours” by Plangdi Neple (Afrofuturist Folk Horror, Body Horror, Atonement)
• “Rooms of Our Own” by Toshiya Kamei (Digital Afterlife Sci-Fi, Grief, Ethics)
• “The Lark Ascending” by Eleanna Castroianni (AI Sci-Fi, Memory, Consciousness, Legacy)

III. Beyond the Sacred Veil (stories that explore the rituals, ideas around justice, and the great grand design of life/death/afterlife)

(These stories are set in more diverse cultural spaces and offer other understandings of death, explore sacred rituals, engage with the idea of spiritual justice, and/or  explore how choices and actions may live on, requiring restoration or resolutions beyond even the grave.)

• “Unquiet on The Eastern Front” by Wole Talabi (Historical Folk Horror, African, Colonialism)
• “Raising an Ancestor” by Kay Mabasa (Cultural Fantasy, African, Ancestral Connection)
• “When Rain Clouds Gather” by Rutendo Chidzodzo (Magical Realism, African, Justice)
• “Onitsha Main, Ochanja, The Twins, Nkpor, and the Shadows of Shoprite” by Somto Ihezue (Magical Realism, Nigerian, Allegory)
• “The Empty Throne” by Benjamin C. Kinney (Theological Speculative, Jewish-themed, Agency)
• “The Colour of the Ninth Wave” by Katie McIvor (Historical Dark Fantasy, Irish Mythology, Justice)

IV. Celestial Dust & Mortal Wills (stories that confront the infinite, the end…)

(This section of stories confronts some of the broader cosmic implications of death, and/or  poignant encounters with cosmic forces beyond our comprehension.)

• “Mister Yellow” by Christina Bauer (Cosmic Sci-Fi, Ethical, Reality, Destruction)
• “At the End of Everything” by Spencer Nitkey (Existential Sci-Fi, Cosmic Decay, Oblivion)
• “The Ghost Tenders of Chornobyl” by Nika Murphy (Historical Supernatural, Ukrainian, Trauma, Healing)
• “Twice Every Day Returning” by Sonya Taaffe (Lyrical Magical Realism, Queer, Cultural, Grief)

V. The Heart’s Persistent Song (works that focus on purpose, acceptance, and those final, lasting echoes of life)

(These final stories anchor the collection with themes of finding new purpose in the afterlife, achieving a meaningful, emotional acceptance of loss, and/or the enduring, transformative nature of love and unique identity.)

• “Leak” by Maria Hossain (Revenant Horror, Environmental Justice, Social Commentary)
• “A Tapestry of Dreams” by Victor Forna (Magical Realism, African, Healing, Choice)
• “The Eleventh Three-Quarters Hour” by Leslie What (Magical Realism, Grief, Bureaucracy, Haunting)
• “What It Means to Drift” by Rajeev Prasad (Sci-Fi, Identity, Emotion, AI, Grief, Purpose, Self-acceptance)
• “A Late Appearance by Death” by Victoria Brun (Literary Speculative, Compassion, Purpose)
• “Fat Kids” by Alex Jennings (Magical Realism, African Diaspora, Identity, Self-acceptance)

Afterlives 2024: The Year’s Best Death Fiction will be available in October 2025—and we’re already lining up good things for the NEXT volume. We’ve got an editor you’re going to love—but more on that later. Let’s read that TOC again…

The novels on this list explore the seductiveness of belonging; the ever-shifting balance of power and responsibility; the insidiousness of academic ableism; the commodification of education; the all-consuming nature of academic careers; the social prerogatives of institutions, and the damage that’s done when those institutions fail to live up to their promises; the abrupt cliff’s edge of what comes after.

They are, in other words, updating the curriculum. And in doing so, they often dislocate academia––pulling it out of classrooms in gothic halls and into other spaces. They take place at institutions ranging from private schools to agricultural colleges, historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs), post-apocalyptic research bases, and the various communities in which these institutions are located. They’re told from the perspectives of faculty, research staff, grad students and undergrads, and struggling alums from a wide range of backgrounds and lived experiences.

In most cases, they’re love letters to education. But they’re also do better letters––calls to action and acts of storytelling solidarity that I hope will inspire all of us to keep fighting for our institutions even as we re-imagine and re-shape them into something better, kinder, and more magical.

The Incandescent by Emily Tesh

Magic schools don’t run on magic alone. Opening with lesson planning and risk assessment, nods to endless meetings and mundane administrative tasks like keeping the (possessed) photocopier in good working order, The Incandescent offers readers a long-overdue glimpse behind the scenes into the compelling lives of faculty and staff.

Doctor Walden, Director of Magic at Chetwood School, spends her days wrangling chaotic teenagers, faculty, and staff at her alma mater. She’s great at her job. But when an invocation in her class goes wrong, attracting the attention of a higher demon, keeping the school safe gets a lot more complicated. Walden must face the fact that she may be the biggest threat to her school.

These Mortal Bodies by Elspeth Wilson

Campus novels are often coming of age stories for good reason: leaving home to study means building a new life and making new connections, ones that transform us into something new in the process. The transformation isn’t always for the better.

Neurodivergent student Ivy Graveson hopes to find connection and belonging when she leaves coastal Scotland to attend an all-girls college at a prestigious university, but breaking into the tight-knit social circle of her elite classmates is daunting. And even as she learns more about her college and the secret societies that thrive there, she’s drawn inevitably and terrifyingly to the bodies of water surrounding her. After an intense year at college, Ivy must decide what matters more: belonging or becoming what she was always meant to be.

A Mastery of Monsters by Liselle Sambury

There are lots of things we learn at college, both on the curriculum and off. But some things we already know bone deep, long before we even think about matriculating.

In A Mastery of Monsters, protagonist August already knows she’ll do anything for her brother. When he disappears, she doesn’t buy the explanation that he left school due to stress. Instead, she follows the clues. An attack by an enormous creature with feathers and claws drives home how much danger her brother might be in. Her search for information about the creature leads her to Virgil Hawthorne who promises that he’ll help her find her brother, but only if she infiltrates a secret society on campus to help him first. Talk about navigating a hidden curriculum.

The Bewitching by Silvia Moreno-Garcia

The archives humanities scholars explore are rarely complete and never neutral, and The Bewitching is a breathtaking examination of the ways privilege has been wielded to warp archives, scholarship, and even lives.

Grad student Minerva is researching the life of little-known author, Beatrice Tremblay at a small liberal arts college in 1990s Massachusetts. But Tremblay’s papers aren’t held by the university, and the local family who owns them won’t give anyone––especially not an international student who has to work to pay tuition––access. When Minerva finally does get access, delving into Tremblay’s manuscripts dredges up an old darkness that is chillingly similar to the stories her Nana Alba told her as a child. Minerva must draw on her research skills as well as her family history and lived experience in order to survive, let alone graduate.

Katabasis by R. F. Kuang

We’ve all gone to great lengths for a letter of recommendation, but anyone who’s braved the academic job market will find the premise of Kuang’s latest novel especially relatable.

Alice Law has worked hard and sacrificed to get where she is, studying Magick with Professor Jacob Grimes, “the world’s greatest magician,” at Cambridge. So when he dies in an accident that might be her fault, of course she’s going to follow him into Hell. Her future is on the line, and she needs his recommendation. Unfortunately, her academic rival has the same plan.

Lessons in Magic and Disaster by Charlie Jane Anders

If you’re in search of dark academia that explores the powerful intersections of queer scholarship, community history, and lived experience, Lessons in Magic and Disaster should be at the top of your TBR.

Literature grad student Jamie decides to teach her mother how to do magic as a way to nudge her back into the world after years spent grieving. But Jamie’s decision unravels her carefully constructed life, and she has to find a way to undo her mother’s magic use while juggling her dissertation on eighteenth-century literature, hostile students and a charged academic environment, and her own relationship trouble––or lose everything she loves.

Higher Magic by Courtney Floyd

Academic life is often full of unspoken assumptions about who gets to be a scholar, and under what circumstances. My debut, Higher Magic, explores what happens when those assumptions transmute into actions and people actively gatekeep “the life of the mind.”

First-generation grad student Dorothe Bartleby has one last chance to pass her Magic program’s qualifying exam. If she can’t, she’ll be expelled. But her anxiety and imposter syndrome make everything exponentially harder. Making matters worse, Bartleby discovers that students are disappearing after submitting accommodation letters. When the administration doesn’t believe her, she must learn to trust in herself or risk failing her students and her exam.

The Book of Autumn by Molly O’Sullivan

When higher education is hostile, toxic, or inaccessible, sometimes the best thing you can do for yourself is walk away. Set at an agricultural college in New Mexico and told as a scholarly report replete with footnotes, The Book of Autumn explores what happens in the aftermath of that decision––and what it might take to return and reclaim your academic (and magical) identity.

Marcella Gibbons has been struggling since she left her PhD program in anthropology in her second year. With out-of-control magic and an unfinished degree, she’s stuck working low-paying jobs to make ends meet. So when one of her former professors reaches out for help looking into a tragic incident on campus, Marcella grudgingly returns even though it means working with Max, the magical other half she cut ties with when she left. Taking the job will give her the funds she needs to properly start fresh, as long as the past doesn’t suck her in.

I’ll Make a Spectacle of You by Beatrice Winifred Iker

The boundaries between community history and scholarly research, folklore and fact are often bruise-mottled, bearing the marks of epistemic violence and appropriation.

Set at a fictional HBCU in Appalachia, I’ll Make a Spectacle of You explores them through the lens of Southern gothic horror.

When Zora Robinson’s thesis advisor offers her a strange diary and nudges her to research local folklore about a beast rumored to roam the woods around campus, she dives in. Pursuing graduate-level research in Appalachian Studies at Bricksbury University is her dream, after all. But the dream quickly turns into a nightmare in the face of a reticent community, a rumored secret society, and a disappearance she’s afraid is evidence that the beast is something more than folklore.

The Salt Oracle by Lorraine Wilson

The darkness in academia doesn’t only gather around students. In The Salt Oracle, a salt-stained murder mystery unravels and reveals that the stakes of research ripple far beyond the confines of the lab.

Part of a vital research team in a broken, post-internet future, Auli studies the Oracle–a girl whose ability to channel ghosts helps scientists chart maps, forecast weather, and collate other important information. When Auli’s mentor lets her in on his scheme to create more Oracles the day before he’s murdered, she’s left to pick up the pieces and––when she’s promoted to fill his place––determine the fate of the Oracles, her research station, and everyone who lives on it.