Category: Haunted Passages

An ominous wind circles you in the middle of an isolated woods. Your friends wander into an empty factory, under the cover of dusk, never to be seen again. These are “Haunted Passages,” new features of unearthly delights.

Fiction Review: Dave Fitzgerald Reads Jess Hagemann’s Documentarian Novel Mother-Eating

Back when I was growing up—a good, Christian boy in the suburban South—there were pretty much three cults that everyone knew by place or name: Waco, Jonestown, and Heaven’s Gate. That was the list. Sure, our parents would decry large-scale organizations like Scientology and Mormonism as cults, but (fair or not) that was largely denigratory,…
Haunted Passages Poetry: “I Ask Mom to Tell Me about Life Back on the Rancho” by Jose Hernandez Diaz

She tells me they had a hen house.I ask if only hens lived in the hen house?No, roosters and chicks, too, she says.She proceeds to patiently describe That sometimes coyotes would sneakInto the hen house, moving rocks, with their noses,Blocking doors to the hen houses. Sometimes, she says,Brazen banditos would rob the hen houses of eggs,…
New Haunted Passages Poetry: “Remember When Exciting” by Daniel Edward Moore

was a murder on the outskirts of town and two hundred jawsdropped quickly to the floor as water troughs on Main Streetfilled with human tears. Horses became tender like kittensyou could ride. Sparrows sang on crime scene tape in aminor key and barns became suspicious of holding morethan hay. Known for their love of God…
Haunted Passages Short Fiction Hybrid: “The Cartographer of Unobservable Roads” by Libby Banks

A PEDESTRIAN GUIDE TO THE ALTERNATIVE ROUTE SYSTEM Seventh Edition (Revised) Compiled by: Dr. Rachel Wallace, Urban GeographerPublisher: Small Compass PressPrice: Free ROUTE 1: THE GRIEF-FOLD PATH Duration: Unmeasurable Difficulty: Moderate (if you’ve lost someone), Impossible (if you haven’t) Begin where the street remembers its old name. Turn left. Walk three blocks. You’ll smell your grandmother’s kitchen…
New Haunted Passages Short Story by David Leo Rice: “The Ward Clerk”

One: Philadelphia, 1965 Only the Ward Clerk, Gladys van Pelt, knew the full nature of the syndrome that tore through and perhaps, in some underlying sense, generated my family, and she shared her findings with no one except those who received me in the end, when it was far too late for that knowledge to…
Haunted Passages: Three Poems by Suzette Bishop

Strawberry Moon Rises We’re living in a mud house,one main room with a sink,a small galley kitchen off the one room,a bathroom somewhere, presumably.It’s handy to have the extra sinkin the main room but also strange.We have a heavy kitchen table. I look for things we might renovate,casting my eyes around and aroundthe main room,…
Haunted Passages: Four Poems by Oleg Olizev

The Fire You Fed You, with your violent inclination,shattered my stove.Now my oven of love is broken,my cranberry juice blooms across the kitchen tiles,staining the grout like evidence.You called it passion.I call it wreckage. You stuffed rice pudding into the wound,as if its sweetness could cover your crimes.Instead of making love, you used me—your hands,…
Fiction Review: Al Kratz Reads Ruyan Meng’s Novel The Morgue Keeper

Ruyan Meng’s The Morgue Keeper is an intense book, maybe more so than any book I’ve read since Cormac McCarthy’s The Road. Across 200 pages and 27 chapters, it tells the story of Qing Yuan, a morgue keeper trying to survive China’s Cultural Revolution in the summer of 1966. Essentially assigned to clean dead bodies…
Poetry for Haunted Passages: “Solitude” by Grace Lynn

This poem pushes off from a riverbank,disturbing wild geese dozing in the current and is chased by a crowd of thrashing,hollering kids. They want to hold it in sight before it goes out into the tides,in its trail an incisioninto the water. The waves like twopages rising.I walk on planks that crackunder my bones but carry themto a path that…