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)

Wheelers Books
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.

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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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