Josh Rountree is no stranger to The Deadlands. He first crossed the boundary into our realm with “Their Blood Smells of Love and Terror” (Issue 11) and returned with “‘Til the Greenteeth Draw Us Down” (Issue 27). Now, Psychopomp gets to share with you the wonders of Summer in the House of the Departed, a novella that blurs the line between now and then…
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.
