Mapping the Interior

Thanks to Tor Nightfire for a physical arc of this beautiful rerelease!

A unique haunted house story unlike anything else I’ve read. Someone (or something) passing a doorway. A reflection caught out of the corner of the eye. A shadow where there shouldn’t be. We’ve all heard or seen or read stories like these. But what Stephen Graham Jones is offering isn’t a boy haunted by the ghost he thinks he’s seen, but a boy encouraging the ghost it could have been.

After the death of his father, his mother moved him and his brother away from the reservation. But if his father died elsewhere, how could he find them here? Is his father returning to save him? His brother? To make his mother less lonely? To make them whole again? He certainly thinks so, and will waste away the nights just praying for another glimpse of his hero.

As much as this story is gut wrenching, it’s also about the boy’s hope, and regardless of whether or not that can be perceived as naive, that’s what hit me so strongly in this one. A novelette length examination on the lengths in which hope can bind us to the past, to the need of a father, to the almost vampiric nature of holding on.