Haunts (2024)

Cover image: Graham Fletcher (by courtesy of the artist) /
Cover design: Daniela Gast (2024)

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

Contents:

On the Road to Nowhere

Revisiting Samuel Butler’s Erewhon

Stories

In the Le Fanu Museum

The Station

The Cat’s Veto

Skeleton tracks

Ghosting

The Interrupted Journey

Wellington

Mythago Wood

The Missing Pages

Cartographies of the Afterlife

Preface: The Treasure House

The Haunted Bookshop

Suicide Note

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/.

Abstract:

This is a set of nine short stories, together with an essay: 'On the Road to Nowhere: Revisiting Samuel Butler’s Erewhon,' which serves as an introduction to the collection as a whole. The book concludes with the novella 'Cartographies of the Afterlife', an account of an imaginary secret society based in the hills of Titirangi, on Auckland's West Coast.

The stories are grouped around the common theme of haunting, in a variety of different forms. Many of them centre on famous authors: Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu, James Joyce, and (of course) the ineffable H. P. Lovecraft. Some have been previously published in periodicals or online, but six - including the novella - are appearing here for the first time.

This is my fifth book of short fiction, after Monkey Miss Her Now (13 stories - 2004), Trouble in Mind (novella - 2005), Kingdom of Alt (7 stories and a novella - 2010), and Ghost Stories (10 stories and two essays - 2019).

99% Press

Available:

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• Amazon.com
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• Dussmann das KulturKaufhaus
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• Foyles
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• The Nile
• Thrift Books
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• Lasavia Publishing
37 Crescent Rd West
Ostend
Waiheke Island
Auckland 1081
https://www.lasaviapublishing.com/

RRP: $NZ 30.00 (+ postage)

Lasavia Publishing

Reviews & Comments:

1. Mike Johnson, "About Us." Lasavia Publishing (2015):
   
   

   Publishers distrust the wild card, that which might put readers too far out of their comfort zones, as if comfort was somehow the purpose of literature. Both writers and readers lose out. Real grass roots work is lost or supplanted by celebrity culture.



2. Melanie Dixon, Moments More: Review of Breach of all Size: Small stories on Ulysses, love and Venice, edited by Michelle Elvy and Marco Sonzogni (The Cuba Press, 2022), 98pp, $30 . Landfall Review Online (June 1, 2022):
   
   

   In the meantime, I’m off to find myself a copy of Ulysses. Maybe I’ll find one in a book exchange in town, something left behind by one of Jack Ross’s characters, ‘travellers who’d repented of their self-improving zeal’.



3. Tracey Slaughter, Facebook (July 1, 2024):
   
   

   Another glorious volume of stories! Architectural, chilling, clever, harrowing, moving, wry.



4. Isabel Haarhaus, Launch Speech (October 5, 2024):
   
   

   Disconcertingly, in this collection it is the usually comforting motifs of bookshops, cats, strolls, suburban streets and home that are the worrying sites, which shows us that it is always local and current fears that transform, trip up and haunt us.

•

Isabel Haarhaus: Haunts on Waiheke (15/7/2024)

Complete Review:

Isabel Haarhaus. "Notes for the launch of Haunts (2024) by Jack Ross (Sunday 6 October, Mairangi Bay):

A long-time admirer of Jack Ross’ work, I was delighted earlier this year when Jack invited me to say a few words at the launch of his new book Haunts. I had loved Ghost Stories (2019) for its probing of the uncanny coincidences scattered throughout the banal and familiar, its tripping us down portals to parallel places and sometimes outright horror, and always enjoy the puzzles and traps laid by Jack’s brainy conversations with impressive bibliographies of writers and texts. So I said yes.

But as it happened, I couldn’t be at the launch, so was grateful that Bronwyn agreed to read out my notes. Fitting, perhaps, to be in the Hastings Road garden today by proxy — not here but still speaking, sort of . . . Ngā mihi nui eh hoa.

When I was trying to work out the key to this wonderfully strange and sometimes elusive collection of Revisits, Stories, Cartographies and Notes – Jack’s 15th book and second collection of ghost stories – I found the references to Jung’s theory of acausal connectivity, whereby internal, psychological events are linked to external world events by meaningful coincidences rather than causal chains, most useful. Going back through the book after several readings, I could see that what connected the places I had annotated most vigorously with exclamation marks, were those dedicated to epistemological questioning of what describes our experience as real or imagined and where these two possibilities intersect.

In “My Best Friend”, part of the Notes section at the end of the collection, the narrator, trying to make sense of things alongside the reader, asks, ‘Does what you write shape, or influence reality? Does it actually have an ‘objective correlative’? . . . All I know is that once I started writing about things that go bump in the night, things started to go bump in the night.’

Musing, or worrying on the extent to which we write, think, imagine, remember, desire and regret our world into being, for me characterises the experience of reading Haunts.

Mostly in the first person, our cast of narrators waveringly guide us through what typically start off as ordinary, everyday places and experiences towards ‘daemonic realit[ies]’ that exist ‘as a contrast to our world of causation and certainty.’

By turns bemused, perplexed, sceptical, frustrated, irritable, outraged and bewildered, the narrative voices, like the settings of the stories themselves, speak from the point of view of the local and recognisable but at a disconcerting slant, the register and tone alluding to other times and places and nervously second guessing themselves.

In “The Station”, our unsure and confused narrator wonders, then panics, as to what he ‘might have done’, as he trapses seemingly in circles in a search of a bookshop. His overwhelming sense that everybody else in the world is ‘moving in entirely the opposite direction’ is the hallmark of anxiety, regret and doubt and the psychic refrain throughout this and other stories.

If, as we are told in “My Best Friend”, ‘[w]hat you think changes what happens to you’, then what, we wonder, will become of these narrators, whose experience of the everyday is as a ‘complete trackless wilderness’?

In “Wellington”, a story about an annoyingly mismanaged delay by Air New Zealand, it is the narrator’s oddly naff turns of phrase, like ‘would to God’, ‘comedy of errors’ and ‘Captain Klutz’, teemed with an incredulous and increasingly shrill and vitriolic tone, that shifts the memory to a parallel colloquial realm, where tensions are nail bitingly high and the glass could shatter dangerously at any moment. Stuck in the no-man’s land that is an airport, the protagonist is ‘quite literally nowhere,’ cleverly returning us to the beginning of the collection, where in “On the Road to Nowhere: Revisiting Samuel Butler’s Erewhon” we learned that ‘nowhere’ is ‘an inversion of utopia’ — be it fantastic nation-building cartography or a seemingly innocuous, if botched, trip to the capital of the country.

The collection teems in homage to the ghosts of illustrious ghost writers – including Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu, M.R. James, Aleister Crowley, Edgar Allen Poe, E.T.A. Hoffman and Patrick Harpur – reminding us that ‘that which we manifest as haunting is a projection of what can at that point in time be imagined.’ So in this book, Jack Ross’ hauntings are around the creek at the back of this garden, in bookshops and homes and streets — sites to which we are repeatedly returned, as in a Kafkaesque labyrinth.

At the heart of the collection, or ‘where it all start[s]’ and to which the stories return, is the creek, swelling from an innocuous body to a ‘raging torrent’ that sometimes, to the children’s horrified delight, floods the neighbourhood. For the children in the story “Mythago Wood”, what’s on the ‘other side’ of the creek is like what is glimpsed in these stories: ‘an alien and yet somehow, fascinatingly paradoxical space’, which, though feared is ‘crossed and recrossed . . . often.’

A generic convention of horror is the protagonist asking if what they are seeing, feeling, experiencing is real or a figment of their imagination, thereby inviting the audience to ask the same about our own experiences. Reading this collection, snatches of strange coincidences and haunting glimpses of paradoxical spaces sneak up on the reader and leak into our reality. We are taken along by our careful yet misstepping narrators until we arrive – or don’t arrive, which might be the point of arrival – to find that we have slipped into some sort of other place or time or both, where we are disorientated and may very well feel conspired against and lost.

Disconcertingly, in this collection it is the usually comforting motifs of bookshops, cats, strolls, suburban streets and home that are the worrying sites, which shows us that it is always local and current fears that transform, trip up and haunt us.

Isabel Haarhaus

•

Mike Johnson: Selected Poems (2023)

Design: Daniela Gast & Rowan Johnson

Mike Johnson. Selected Poems 1977-2022. Edited by Jack Ross. ISBN 978-1-991083-00-5. 99% Press. Auckland: Lasavia Publishing Ltd., 2023. 206 pp.

Contents:

Introduction

from The Palanquin Ropes (1983)


1. sparrow of ashes
2. salmon leap, buck
3. I’ve never had a chipped bowl
4. branch, bare dawn
5. delved into religions
6. the poet asks
7. much time spent afraid
8. wind through my hands

from From a Woman in Mt Eden Prison & Drawing Lessons (1984)


9. feeling at home
10. cinderella
11. doing a starfish
12. exercise four

from Standing Wave (1985)


13. street sign – Oneroa, Waiheke Island
14. a red paper fish
15. enough
16. I found the ten thousand lines missing
17. J was a captive of wonder. She travelled
18. I’m burying it
19. no change
20. you have to be able
21. all things come to rest
22. memory rock

from Span 23 (1986)


23. the children

from Treasure Hunt (1996)


24. 2 - Learning to read is like trying to walk on your hands –
25. 4 - Here there are signs which don’t so much exist
26. 5 – If the telephone rings, don’t answer
27. 7 – Be glad there’s still a morepork or two left
28. 10 - Look for this one in the most ordinary places
29. 11 – Go to the city if you have the gall
30. 13 – There are Clues that can be found
31. 17 – Certain things you will notice, little irrelevancies
32. 19 – The chase ends in the dissipation of moons –
33. Night of the blue moon a warm northerly rain comes down
34. They’ve all gone mad, love. There’s Nanu, ringing me up
35. On the day another Bosnian peace accord collapsed
36. Dark rain sweeps the valley at dawn
37. Seeing you after the play
38. The scoop of Palm Beach was dark as we walked
39. Watch us
40. She chops up her fingers on the chopping board
41. Winter Solstice
42. Skull has a resurrection, the kind known
43. When the man with the grey skin comes to your door
44. We huddle down behind the pews, pressing ourselves
45. Edicts have been issued, the guards doubled and queues are forming
46. I want to convey that quality of light that goes frail
47. Walking up through the section

from The Vertical Harp: Selected Poems of Li He (2006)


48. singing the blues on Mt Hua
49. curly beard
50. autumn on its way
51. incarceration
52. high mountain, goddess trails
53. cold canyons
54. found arrowhead
55. on the frontier

from To Beatrice Where We Crossed The Line (2014)


56. Soft Toy Goddess
57. Eyeglass in Gaza
58. After Alamu Prabhu
59. My Father was a Shoulder

from Two Lines and a Garden (2017)


60. after everything
61. for the fish, no notion of rain
62. mountain, beach, and valley, sky and stone

from Ladder With No Rungs (2019)


63. distance is measured in the body
64. she drew a line through her memory
65. tyres crunch on gravel
66. words, can’t be located
67. between the uprights and the

from Raising Light Trilogy (2020):

1 - The Toy Box


68. a house with no windows
69. Scheherazade: a still life
70. Noddy – a short story
71. Goldilocks the refugee
72. where it goes, nobody knows
73. you can’t say we didn’t get fair warning
74. the map is not the territory
75. we have these things
76. cowboy capers
77. memories of an arrow

2 - Hide Your Eyes: The Rumi Poems


78. that greater frenzy
79. see-saw
80. most gentle revenge
81. cultivation
82. the Beloved rules
83. the gardenia
84. the wooden spoon
85. sensual senses
86. cutting up shadows into syllables
87. the empty boat

3 - Extinction Rebellion: A Tribute


88. the intention
89. as we lived
90. soft bandage
91. the same world
92. no longer the sun
93. stealing flowers
94. the book
95. not as dead
96. this is where I died
97. the houses of sleep

from Flippity Fluppity Flop (2021)


98. One little match-head
99. Bugle call
100. Poems
101. Before
102. Run, run, run
103. My Mummy

from Sketches (2023)


104. labyrinth
105. Coromandel wake up
106. bird sketches
107. the power of the eagle
108. Whakanewha sunrise
109. Putiki Point
110. beach walk
111. movement
112. Palm Beach in the age of Covid 19
113. Thompson’s Point
114. From the slopes of Ruapehu
115. passing through
116. a trick of the eye
117. at Auckland hospital
118. at Found – Surfdale
119. winter rain

Poetry Bibliography

•
Mike Johnson

Available:

Lasavia Publishing
37 Crescent Rd West
Ostend
Waiheke Island
Auckland 1081
https://www.lasaviapublishing.com/

•

Blurb:

A meaty and satisfying selection of the work of one of New Zealand's most preeminent and prolific poets, tracing the development of his work from the seventies to today

'Johnson is one of New Zealand's most acomplished and inventive writers, at one with the word, its power, its airy fitness and everyday solidities, its resourcefulness, its craft.'

- Siobhan Harvey, winner of the Kathleen Grattan
poetry award, 2019

'The immense complexity of human relationships, social, sexual and everyday are at the heart of much of Mike’s best poetry. However, there’s an almost equal pull towards the empyrean: the cosmic mysteries of nature and the visible world, the beauty of the birds, trees and beaches which surround him in his longtime home-base, Waiheke Island.'

- Jack Ross, editor of Poetry New Zealand (2014-2019)

'[Johnson finds] just the right formulation to deiver a descriptive vitalism that is open, alert, tentative, ambulatory, elegant, palpable.'

- David Eggleton, Poet Laureate, 2019-2022

•
Mike Johnson: Afterworld (2023)

Reviews & Comments:

1. Lindsay Rabbitt, "The Blue Drift: Selected Poems by Mike Johnson (Lasavia Publishing, 2023), 208pp, $34.99; Sketches: Poems and drawings by Mike Johnson with artwork by Leila Lees (Lasavia Publishing, 2023), 172pp, $21.99; Afterworld by Mike Johnson (Lasavia Publishing, 2023), 74 pp, $19.99." Landfall Review Online (March 1, 2021):
   

   We’re at the library to launch three new Lasavia titles; and I say a few words about the history of Mike’s first book, which is represented by eight poems in his Selected Poems. The Selected Poems has been edited by literary critic and author Jack Ross, who also has had a book of short stories, called Ghost Stories, published by Lasavia. Poet and writer Murray Edmond speaks eloquently about Mike’s ‘magic realism’ novella Afterworld; and Mike and his partner Leila Lees take the floor to talk about, among other things, the wonderfully conceived and well-designed Sketches, in which Leila’s colour-grained-and-washed drawings and sketches accompany Mike’s poems.
   
   The Introduction to Mike Johnson’s Selected Poems by Jack Ross begins with a poem that was first published in the eighth collection, Ladder Without Rungs:

   I want you to think about it, she said.
   I am, he said.
   
   It’s not helping, she said.

   Ross writes: ‘a strong sense of humour … the immense complexity of human relationships, social, sexual and everyday, is at heart of much of Mike’s best poetry. However, there’s an almost equal pull towards the empyrean: the cosmic mysteries of nature and the visual world, the beauty of the birds, trees and beaches that surround him in his long-time home-base, Waiheke Island.’
   
   Ross selected 128 poems from the approximately 950 Johnson has published over the past 40 years. Johnson’s 12 collections are: The Palanquin Ropes, written in Whakatane, after Mike had spent eight years wandering abroad, and dedicated to the Indian medical practitioner turned philosopher Dr R.P. Kaushik (1926–81) who ‘sparked the flame’; A Woman in Mt Eden Prison & Drawing Lessons (1984); Standing Wave (1985); Span 23 (1986); Treasure Hunt (1996); The Vertical Harp: Selected poems of Li He (2006); To Beatrice Where We Crossed The Line (2014); Two Lines and a Garden (2017); Ladder With No Rungs (2019); The Toy Box: Book one of Raising Light Trilogy (2020); Hide Your Eyes: The Rumi Poems, book two of Raising Light Trilogy (2020); Extinction Rebellion: A Tribute, book three of Raising Light Trilogy: Flippity Fluppity Flop (2021) and Sketches (2023).
   
   ... Flicking through the Selected Poems, I land on a poem called ‘as we lived’ that I’d previously read on his Facebook page. It impressed me because of its restrained disgust and matter-of-fact clockwork: ‘Our history will be written in rock / in the fossil records / in broken landscapes / and plastic filled oceans // the planet itself will be our memorial / and our obituaries will be carved / from violent skies / and a shimmering heat haze // a short-lived species, as species go / for as we lived, we died.’

•

Ghost Stories (2019)

Cover image: Graham Fletcher (by courtesy of the artist) /
Cover design: Daniela Gast (2019)

Ghost Stories. ISBN 978-0-9951165-5-9. 99% Press. Auckland: Lasavia Publishing, 2019. 140 pp.

Contents:

Introduction

The Classic New Zealand Ghost Story

Stories

Eketahuna

The Scam

Featherston

Leaves from a Diary of the End of the World

Is it Infrareal or is it Memorex?

Company

General Grant in Paeroa

Brothers

Catfish

The Cross-Correspondences

Paragraphs

Kipling and the Cross-Correspondences

Blurb:

David Foster Wallace once wrote that 'every love story is a ghost story.' Not all of the stories in Jack Ross’s new collection are about love, but certainly all of them concern ghosts – imaginary, real, or entirely absent. As it turns out, there are even stranger things in the world: from haunted hotel rooms in Beijing to drunken poetry readings on Auckland’s North Shore. Or perhaps, as the Mayan prophets foresaw, the world really did end on the 21st December, 2012, and 'all bets are off, all the rules have changed, and – new Adams, new Eves – we have to find the courage somehow to start naming the strange new things we see.'

'There’s no one in New Zealand literature exploring the dark ways of narrative with the alchemical touch of Jack Ross, and his gift of spinning tales which jump "from track to track on the time-space continuum" never fails to leave me exhilarated, in outright awe'.

- Tracey Slaughter

Jack Ross works as a senior lecturer in creative writing at Massey University. He is the author of five poetry collections, four novels and three books of short fiction. His novel The Annotated Tree Worship was highly commended in the 2018 NZ Heritage Book Awards. He has also edited numerous books, anthologies, and literary journals, including brief, Landfall, and Poetry New Zealand. He blogs at http://mairangibay.blogspot.com/.

Abstract:

This is a set of ten short stories, with two essays: 'The Classic New Zealand Ghost Story,' an introduction to the collection as a whole; and 'Kipling and the Cross-Correspondences,' an account of the alleged attempts at communication from the other side by various dead members of the Society for Psychical Research in the early years of last century.

The stories, too, are grouped around the common theme of ghosts and ghost stories, but in some rather unexpected ways. Two ('The Scam' and 'The Cross-Correspondences') are set in China, but most are explorations of the haunted landscapes of the New Zealand's North Island, from Featherston and Eketahuna to Raglan and Northcote. All of them (with the exception of 'Paragraphs') have been previously published in periodicals or online.

This is my third collection of short stories, after Monkey Miss Her Now (13 stories - 2004) and Kingdom of Alt (7 stories and a novella - 2010).

99% Press

Available:

Amazon.com
RRP: $US 15.00 (+ postage)

Amazon.co.uk
RRP: £UK 12.28 (+ postage)

Book Depository
RRP: $NZ 29.44 (free postage)

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RRP: $NZ 49.50

Lasavia Publishing
37 Crescent Rd West
Ostend
Waiheke Island
Auckland 1081
https://www.lasaviapublishing.com/
Lasavia Publishing: Editorial

RRP: $NZ 20.00 (+ postage)

Lasavia Publishing

Reviews & Comments:

1. Brooke Georgia, Aubade (March 17, 2022):
   
   

   As the New Zealand writer and academic 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’s use of found objects, both in her garments and visual art, speaks to this gothic complex due to the way she works with and repurposes abandoned materials. Not only running against the tendencies of fast fashion and its associated wastefulness, this praxis speaks to the mysterious histories of objects, raising the questions of where they come from and what they have seen. The objects already have their own stories and their own weight of being, aside from their material reality, although this can never be directly accessed.
   
   Rather than turning to the new, Brooke Georgia looks to these pre-existing objects and carefully reworks them, sensitive to their unique individual agency. The mystique associated with these objects emphasises critical aspects of the unknown, because in the gothic imagination the non-human exists within the human and vice versa.



2. Shana Chandra, Haunted by Home. Landfall Review Online (March 1, 2023):
   
   

   ... Shayne P. Carter’s memoir Dead People I Have Known offered me a paraphrase from a James K. Baxter poem. In the poem, Baxter philosophises that, due to the vast and unrelenting nature of Aotearoa’s landscape, which continually confronts each person who inhabits it, we are constantly reminded of our mortality.
   
   It was a quote that I was reminded of when reading the introduction to Jack Ross’s most recent collection of short stories, Ghost Stories (2019). The collection begins with an essay entitled ‘The Classic New Zealand Ghost Story’, which investigates the history of ghost stories in Aotearoa. It features Ross’s collected bibliography of books on the subject and the characteristics and narrative arc that define our Kiwi version of these universal stories. One of the most notable characteristics is that our ‘local product’ strongly emphasises haunted space rather than haunted people.
   
   As colonised land, it makes sense that our islands would be threatening, with death coating its soil and its sacredness to Māori consistently desecrated. It makes sense that the land, the whenua, would transpire to avenge this desecration, encoded as it is with the tikanga of Māori tapu. But so, too, does Baxter’s quote come into play here: the enormity of Aotearoa’s landscape, eerie in its isolation, is the perfect setting for our ghost stories. This ‘dark, threatening land’ — a trope Ross quotes from Sam Neil’s seminal documentary Cinema of Unease — haunts its inhabitants instead of vice versa.



3. Douglas A. Andersen, Wormwoodiana (August 8, 2024):
   
   

   ... topics run from numerology to L. Frank Baum, old movies to Mayan eschatology, General Grant of the US Civil War on to sites to see in modern China, as well as covering aspects of Kipling - some of his stories, as well as his "mad" sister, Alice Fleming.



4. The Story Graph:
   
   

   Across hotel rooms in Beijing and bars on Auckland’s North Shore, these quietly unsettling tales drift between love and absence, suggesting that every journey is haunted by the ghosts we carry and the world that may have ended while we weren’t looking.
   
   For the literary wanderer who welcomes ghosts.

The Story Graph (2025)

•


Massey University: The Gothic Imagination (2022)

Email Interview:

Jenny Lawn. 'Teaching "Eketahuna" for "The Gothic Imagination" - some questions from students.' Private Email (14-15 March, 2022):

Kia ora Jack

I hope you're in fine fettle and managing to keep omicron at bay.

Thank you for being willing to entertain some questions from The Gothic Imagination class about “Eketāhuna.” Students have expressed that they enjoy the story. In the syllabus, it sits alongside M.R. James’ “Lost Hearts” and Saki’s “The Open Window.”

Here are some questions, which you are welcome to address however you prefer, and in whatever format you prefer e.g. writing, audio or video response, interview with me.

Here we go:

1. Students were curious about the series of empty places: starting with Eketāhuna itself, a town that some say doesn’t exist; the abandoned town; the empty campground-paddock; and the non-existent (?) motel itself. Here are some student questions on this point:
   • Is the point of the story that we see what we want to see or believe what we want to believe in life? Or is life more complicated then what we see as reality and time and there are more dimensions that exist?
   • I felt a false sense of security after the campsite. I however thought it was just the old man who was going to be the ghost, and not his daughter as well. Not sure if anyone else got tricked by this as well?
   • Did anyone else think the climax of the story was in Eketāhuna, begin to relax because the “climax” was just no one being around and a sub-standard campsite, and then get more of a shock from the actual climax because of that false sense of security?
   • Why do you think the daughter believes her father to be a ghost? What do you think separates her death from her father's? How come the two ghosts don’t know each other exists?
2. On the narrative voice:
   • I’m really curious about the quote, “It’s tempting to call it ‘13’ and make the whole thing sound spookier than it was.” The story to date had given me an eerie feeling, why downplay it?
   • Was the narrator's voice a conscious choice, or if there was at one point a draft written where the narrator is more insistent that the events were a truly supernatural experience?
   • The fact that Ross’ narrator seemed to be conscious of the fact that his experiences as they unfolded were fodder for good dinner party conversation really resounded with me. His use of certain words, phrases and gothic tropes indicated to me that the narrator was aware of the potential ridiculousness of comparing his experience to some gothic ghostly tale - but that this comparison would provide a certain amount of intrigue, and reflected the unshakeable fear of things actually going wrong.
3. The tone of the story comes off as recognisably Kiwi. How would you say your story sits within larger tradition(s) of ghost stories in Aotearoa New Zealand? A related question: Are you appealing to Kiwis, and how might non-Kiwis feel about the writing?
4. Did you grow up (and now live) in the city or more rurally and has this affected your writing? More generally, do you have any thoughts on how rural areas figure in the New Zealand Pākehā imaginary? Is there a specific local legend around Eketāhuna?
5. What advice do you have for students who are writing their own ghost stories, in terms of how to create atmosphere and suspense?
6. Which ghost story writers have most influenced your writing and why? More specifically: did you have any other “motel horror stories” in mind?
7. Anything else you'd like to add …

Looking forward to hearing your always canny observations and ghosts and all the rest.

Ngā mihi nui

Jenny

•

Kia ora Jenny,

Your letter has forced me to reread 'Eketahuna', which was quite an interesting experience. It all seems such a long time ago, really.

I'll do my best to answer the questions below, but in some cases I have to admit that your guess is probably as good as mine. Your queries are very acute, though - going straight to the heart of the matter:

• Is the point of the story that we see what we want to see or believe what we want to believe in life? Or is life more complicated then what we see as reality and time and there are more dimensions that exist?

Well, that's the big question, isn't it? I certainly wish I could answer it definitively, but you're certainly right to see it as the basic dilemma posed by the story. I certainly want to believe in the second alternative, and have probably slanted the narrative in that direction. On the other hand, all the narrator's observations are so contingent and deliberately unreliable that one has to acknowledge the first as an equally valid reading.

• I felt a false sense of security after the campsite. I however thought it was just the old man who was going to be the ghost, and not his daughter as well. Not sure if anyone else got tricked by this as well?

I've always been addicted to 'literary' ghost stories - M. R. James, Algernon Blackwood, and all the rest. I wrote this one as a kind of low-octane, vernacular nod to that genre. A twist of some sort is always required, though, and the best I could come up with was the double-ghost shtick. I'm very pleased to read of your reaction, as that's certainly what I *wanted* a reader to experience. The Irish poet Paul Muldoon speaks of sending a 'stunt reader' through each poem he writes just after it's finished - a kind of imaginary everyreader who will hopefully react to each clue, in turn, as it's presented. My ideal reader would certainly feel just as you did, but of course that's not to say that readers actually do.

• Did anyone else think the climax of the story was in Eketāhuna, begin to relax because the “climax” was just no one being around and a sub-standard campsite, and then get more of a shock from the actual climax because of that false sense of security?

Again, I love this reading, since that really was the point of the story for me - my (real) experience of driving through Eketahuna under precisely those circumstances (campground and all), capped by a bit of ghostly scaffolding at the end.

• Why do you think the daughter believes her father to be a ghost? What do you think separates her death from her father's? How come the two ghosts don’t know each other exists?

It's an odd admission, but I have to confess that I spend a lot of time thinking about ghosts and how they feel and react to things in general: which naturally includes each other. There is, in a sense, no such thing in purely narrative terms, since we can only describe living reactions and emotions - so our 'ghost' characters are really just adapted people, just as animal characters are always more or less anthropomorphic. I did get a kick out of the idea of a ghost who thought it was her father who was the ghost - the wheels within wheels suggested by that (and perhaps corollary doubts of the narrator's own status). I hasten to say that this is not an original thought: the classic Mexican novel Pedro Páramo, by Juan Rulfo, does wonderful things with a whole town full of ghosts who mostly think they are still alive.

• I’m really curious about the quote, “It’s tempting to call it ‘13’ and make the whole thing sound spookier than it was.” The story to date had given me an eerie feeling, why downplay it?

There was a British writer called A. J. Alan who used to tell ghost stories on the radio in the 1930s. I never heard any of them, but I've read quite a few, and they're in this very conversational, colloquial tone. I guess I was trying to get something of the same feeling into my narrative style - a narrator who is trustworthy because so self-deprecating and a bit slangy at times.

• Was the narrator's voice a conscious choice, or if there was at one point a draft written where the narrator is more insistent that the events were a truly supernatural experience?

No, I always needed a narrator to play down rather than build up the events, as those events basically evaporate if you look at them too closely. It's an old trick, really - Jane Austen does it wonderfully in Northanger Abbey. She wrote a very dramatic story, with a young lady thrown out from the house she's staying at because her venal old host has discovered that she's not really the rich heiress he expected, but it sounds very real because it's constantly paralleled by Catherine's own absurdly over-the-top readings of things based on endless perusal of Gothic novels. In my case, the narrator is aware of telling a ghost story, but constantly tries to emphasise its failure to be as melodramatic as such things are conventionally beefed up to be.

• The fact that Ross’ narrator seemed to be conscious of the fact that his experiences as they unfolded were fodder for good dinner party conversation really resounded with me. His use of certain words, phrases and gothic tropes indicated to me that the narrator was aware of the potential ridiculousness of comparing his experience to some gothic ghostly tale - but that this comparison would provide a certain amount of intrigue, and reflected the unshakeable fear of things actually going wrong.

I don't know if it matters if the narrator is likeable, but I think he definitely has to sound plausible. If he's a fantasist, then there's little interest in any experience he recounts. He's certainly very conscious of his role as a storyteller throughout, but I wanted him to be the kind who leaves you with a sense of something worryingly *possible*. What could happen if you set out to drive across country in the middle of the night. That great NZ film The Locals plays lots of interesting variations on that notion.

• The tone of the story comes off as recognisably Kiwi. How would you say your story sits within larger tradition(s) of ghost stories in Aotearoa New Zealand? A related question: Are you appealing to Kiwis, and how might non-Kiwis feel about the writing?

I guess that's more for the audience to answer. I certainly didn't play down the local colour and flavour, but those are the things I enjoy when I read stories from elsewhere, so I doubt that it's a problem for the sort of people who actually read short stories still. In the context of the book as a whole, though, I do develop some ideas about the nature of NZ ghost stories as a form: their relation to a pervading sense of alienation from the land contingent on the sins of colonialism. Again, that's something that's come out strongly in NZ film as well as the many, many ghost stories which seem to infest our literature: always some dark secret to be hidden, then gradually unearthed.

• Did you grow up (and now live) in the city or more rurally and has this affected your writing? More generally, do you have any thoughts on how rural areas figure in the New Zealand Pākehā imaginary? Is there a specific local legend around Eketāhuna?

Oh, I'm a born-and-bred suburbanite. But nowhere is truly urban in New Zealand - the country comes busting in no matter what you do. I think that's why I feel NZ is such a great place for storytellers: things buried deeply elsewhere are so much closer to the surface here: our small towns are so terrifying, our cities always on the point of disintegration (as in the recent occupation of Wellington Central: talk about the return of the repressed!) I don't know if there are any local legends around Eketāhuna, but it was a real motel. It's important to remember that. I *hope* there are some such legends, mind you.

• What advice do you have for students who are writing their own ghost stories, in terms of how to create atmosphere and suspense?

I don't really have much wisdom to impart on that. I feel myself that the closer they are to real experience - in the background details, at least - the more effective they're likely to be. Again, I think it has to be a vehicle for expressing your own doubts and unease over the nature of reality. As M. R. James stresses, a friendly ghost is really a contradiction in terms. By their very nature they question our assumptions, and you must be interested in that queasy feeling yourself before you can communicate your doubts to a reader.

• Which ghost story writers have most influenced your writing and why? More specifically: did you have any other “motel horror stories” in mind?

I suppose I've read so much M. R. James over the years that he remains my touchstone for ghost stories. I also love Dickens's few ghost stories: 'The Signalman', in particular. Shirley Jackson is one of the very few people who's ever written an effective ghostly novel, rather than just her (excellent) ghost stories. And finally there are such Stephen King stories as 'Rm 1408' (a great haunted hotel story) and 'All that you love will be carried away' - a wonderful haunted motel story.

• Anything else you'd like to add …

As I said above, I hadn't reread the story for ages, and it's hard to say what I make of it as a whole. The thing that seems most valuable about such exercises, though, is the degree to which your piece gradually sounds less and less like something you wrote yourself and more and more like something you just picked up to read. That's actually a bit of a relief.

And then there's the fact that the story itself embodies an interesting time shift - the actual experience it's based on, then the process of writing (and rewriting) it, and now, years later, seeing it as a kind of thing in itself. It's as if all of those times are still present inside it, which is probably the main reason why I persevere with trying to write things: good or bad, they mark and preserve time: for yourself, certainly; but possibly, if they strike a chord, for other people also.

I hope that's some help. It's certainly been very enjoyable - though also terrifying - to see my story through other people's eyes. Thanks for inviting me to contribute to your thinking on such gothic themes in general ...

ngā mihi hui, jack

A/Prof Jennifer Lawn

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