Author: Heavy Feather

“Please Consider an Upgrade,” original short fiction for Haunted Passages by Carrie Bindschadler

Dear Declan, Thank you for your recent purchase of our signature Home Seance Basic Package. This specially-curated package is our most affordable option. This package allows you to contact a single recently-deceased human being or beloved pet one time only. If you are interested in repeat spiritual visitations, you will need to upgrade to the…
Dr. No, a satirical spy novel by Percival Everett, reviewed by Adam Camiolo

Dr. No, the satirical spy novel by Percival Everett, is uncommonly funny, ridiculously smart, and has a serious score to settle. It is, in short, quite good. The book follows the misadventures of Professor Wala Kitu, a theoretical mathematician whose name is Tagalog and Swahili respectively for Nothing Nothing. Wala specializes in Nothing, an abstract…
Haunted Passages: Two Poems by Matt Wedlock

Tatterdemalion She goes to the laptop on her bed and clicks away with the mouse. It turns white, then cherry colared, then tells herself she needs to update the template. They read for a while, laugh at the link to Waheeda Rehman’s interview in 1996. In the cornerthere’s another tool the techies might send her:…
“An Angry Bull Loose in a Video Store”: Jesse Hilson Reviews Steve Gergley’s Novel Skyscraper

Anyone who has shown up for a new job at a large, intricate organization and tried to get their bearings in the workplace will be able to relate to the germ of the idea behind Steve Gergley’s new novel Skyscraper. A 23-year-old man named Dan Simmons’s would like to play video games and watch action…
Haunted Passages Short Story: “How Close Is It?” by Darlene Eliot

Night driving was easy. He knew what to do with a windy mountain pass, a straight shot through cornfields, a detour around streets too narrow for an eighteen-wheeler. He knew what to do when the moon disappeared behind checkpoints and his headlights were the only light on the road. He knew what to do when…
Side A: “Night” a poem by Brenton Booth

Night She says she has been thinking a lot about killing herself. How everything would be much easier then. She has tears in her eyes she can’t control, I know she isn’t lying. I think of our first date. Wandering around the Botanical Gardens just before it closed for the night. There was an exhibition…
“To Not Get Crystallized into Habits and Things”: Jacob Smullyan in Conversation with Paolo Pergola

Paolo Pergola is the author of Passaggi—avventure di un autostoppista (Rides: The Adventures of a Hitchhiker) (Exorma, 2013) and Attraverso la finestra di Snell (Through Snell’s Window) (Italo Svevo Edizione, 2019). His work has appeared in several Italian literary magazines. He is a member of OPLEPO/Opificio di Letteratura Potenziale (Workshop of Potential Literature), Italy’s equivalent of France’s OULIPO. He…
“self-evident and completely incomprehensible”: Austin Miles on Evan Isoline’s Insensible Text DƐVDMVTH

Insensibility invokes an opening. What’s insensible is ungriddable, unseizable, or unknown, even in plain sight. The inhuman geographer Kathryn Yusoff, writing on insensible nature, says that it is “that which appropriates sense without being sensible to appropriation.” She draws on Georges Bataille’s notion of insensibility: “a form of animality which opens up a depth that…
Poetry: “First Act of a Movie Where I Loved You the Entire Time” by Angela Sun

for dad ESTABLISHING SHOT. Flowers purpling in the dying light like fingers. Our house flushed with the smell of something sweet. IN THE HALLWAY. You, walking into the shape of this silence— white as bones in the lightning of cracks on the soles of your shoes Where are you? This place smuggles echoes into the…