Monday

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).



Available:



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

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

  3. 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.


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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.




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