Category: Haunted Passages

Beasts of 42nd Street, a new novel by Preston Fassel, reviewed by Dave Fitzgerald

I didn’t pick up my first Stephen King—The Shining—until 2016, but boy did he buy up a ton of early real estate in my young mind. An eight-year-old screening of the edited-for-TV Kubrick film was basically my intro to horror as a concept, and my favorite aunt and uncle were King superfans. I still remember…
“Winter” by Jesse Lee Kercheval: A Graphic Narrative for Haunted Passages

*Ed.’s Note: click images to view larger sizes. Jesse Lee Kercheval is a writer, translator, and visual artist. Her graphic essays have won awards from New Letters and the New Ohio Review and appeared in the Los Angeles Review and the Superstition Review. Her latest book is the poetry collection, I Want to Tell You (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2023).
“The Ritual,” a short story for Haunted Passages by Paul Rousseau

The sky was unflinching judgment, set ablaze. Holy shades of red and yellow in acrylic smears. Clouds scrambled to hide behind treetops where they could peek through branches and parted leaves. Night was close. The lights were about to dim. I was getting some final jumpers in at the elementary school playground just down the…
“Ghost Fingers,” a Haunted Passages short story by Justin Carter

Sometime in the 1940s, a school bus in Horton, Texas, was hit by a train after stalling on the tracks. One week later, a truck stalled in the same spot. As a train bared down on the truck, the driver braced for impact, but the truck slowly rolled down off the crossing, just seconds before…
Haunted Passages Digital Collage: “The Frenzy of an Indispensable Hallucination” by Bill Wolak

*Ed.’s Note: click image to view larger size. Bill Wolak has just published his eighteenth book of poetry entitled All the Wind’s Unfinished Kisses with Ekstasis Editions. His collages and photographs have appeared as cover art for such magazines as Phoebe, Harbinger Asylum, Baldhip Magazine, and Barfly Poetry Magazine.
“Fugitive,” a new poem for Haunted Passages by Douglas Cole

These junkyards at the edge of cities,towers of wrecks, cars with bloodstill on the driver seat, the windshield—I am looking for a water pump, a new heart. The raw road, the gravel pit,the trailer where I get my insurancefrom a salesman heavy with gold chains.No one around here remembers rain. I am a drive-through ghost.Aren’t…
Haunted Passages: “The Gold-Eyed Plague,” a short story by Sophie Panzer

The girls arrived on a bad wind like blight and ate up our lives like locusts. Some of us believed they were a divine punishment for gay marriage and transgenders in bathrooms. Others blamed climate change (this happened in a swing state). Only a few of us realized they probably had something to do with…
Haunted Passages Poetry: “Registry” by Dane Slutzky

We got married before the disasterand now, whenever something happens,a package shows up on the doorstep. When part of the continent crumbled awayinto the sea, the UPS guy drove byleaving three ceramic mixing bowls. When the trees all caught the root disease,passing it to each other through the fungiin the earth, we got a toaster.…
Haunted Passages: Five Poems by Scott Ferry

this is a poem about the fish on the dock whose mouth gasps a 0 as it tries to breatheand my son stares at it and jumps when it kicks against the wood and he makes his mouth into a 0then closes 0 then closes i say don’t touch it and i don’t say it…