Haunts (2024)

Cover image: Graham Fletcher / Cover Design: Daniela Gast /
Illustrations: Rowan Sylva

(July 1) Haunts. ISBN: 978-1-991083-17-3. 99% Press. Auckland: Lasavia Publishing, 2024. 202 pp.

1. On the Road to Nowhere
   Revisiting Samuel Butler’s Erewhon (18/2-1/12/15)

Stories:


2. In the Le Fanu Museum (12-13/7-27/8/19)
3. The Station (15/11/19-27/1/20)
4. The Cat’s Veto (13/12/19-27/1/20)
5. Skeleton tracks (18-19/11/21)
6. Ghosting (18-24/3/22; 22/4/22)
7. The Interrupted Journey (9/12/20-16/7/21)
8. Wellington (7/6/22-21/9/23)
9. Mythago Wood (19/5/22-16/8/23)
10. The Missing Pages (26/7-15/8/23)

Cartographies of the Afterlife: (16/1/22-20/9/23)


11. Preface: The Treasure House (21-24/6/22)
12. The Haunted Bookshop (30/1-8/2/22-19/9/23)
13. Suicide Note (16-29/1; 13-15/4/22-20/9/23)

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Lasavia Publishing


Mister, we’re all you’ve got.

– – Stephen King, Mr Mercedes (2014) [1]

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Stories

The editor says he won’t consider any of the following:

Stories about gangsters, politics, regional problems. Stories with historical settings. Military stories, World War Two. Stories with a college background. Sex stories. Stories with smart-alec dialogue. Stories in which characters drink. Stories with a newspaper background. Dialect stories. Stories about writers or editors or advertising men. Radio stories. Stories about religion. Stories concerning insanity. Crime stories. Mistaken identity stories. Stories of the First World War. Stories about adolescent characters.

Apart from that, you’re as free as the birds in the tree tops and can write about anything you like.

– P. G. Wodehouse, Performing Flea (1953) [2]

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Cartographies of the Afterlife


A forethought of death that we may find ourselves at death
Not helplessly strange to the new conditions.

– W. H. Auden [3]

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Blurb:

As Jack Ross stated in his latest collection Ghost Stories, 'We’re most haunted by that which we’ve worked hardest to deny and eradicate from our lives.'

– Brooke Georgia, Aubade (2022)

What do we actually mean by the word haunt? In this new set of stories inspired by the term, Jack Ross invokes a series of his favourite haunts via voices from the past, beginning with Samuel Butler’s Erewhon and concluding with Emanuel Swedenborg.
In between he visits with Irish ghost-story maestro Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu, along with others ranging from James Joyce to H. P. Lovecraft – not to mention Scheherazade herself, creator / narrator of The 1001 Nights.
Most importantly of all, perhaps, he tries to settle accounts with his own father, the architect of a vast entangled empire of native bush and weeds at the back of their suburban quarter-acre section in Mairangi Bay.
The book ends with the novella Cartographies of the Afterlife, an exploration of the penumbra between life and death, based on accounts from recent visitors.
In the immortal words of Bette Davis: 'Fasten your seatbelts, it's going to be a bumpy night.'


Jack Ross is the author of six poetry collections, four novels, and four books of short fiction. His previous collection, Ghost Stories (Lasavia, 2019), has been prescribed for writing courses at three local universities. He’s also edited numerous books, anthologies, and literary journals, including (most recently) Mike Johnson’s Selected Poems (2023).
He blogs at http://mairangibay.blogspot.com/.

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Notes:

[1] Stephen King, Mr Mercedes: A Novel. London: Hodder & Stoughton, 2014), 382.

[2] P. G. Wodehouse, Performing Flea: A Self-Portrait in Letters. With an Introduction and Additional Notes by W. Townend, and the Text of P. G. Wodehouse’s Five Berlin Broadcasts. 1953 (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1961), 166..

[3] W. H. Auden, ‘1929’. Collected Shorter Poems: 1927-1957 (London: Faber, 1966), 38.

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Graham Fletcher, "Untitled," from the King of the Wood series (2002)
[photograph by Sait Akkirman]

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