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: 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…
Haunted Passages Short Story: “Pileups” by Andrew Graham Martin

Talking himself into a heart attack, Moses found, was easier than bending a spoon with his mind, which he’d tried without success to do for months in his youth. His mom had bought him Uri Geller’s book on psychokinesis as a consolation prize for not receiving a letter to Hogwarts on his eleventh birthday, and…
“In Search of Lost Monsters”: Adam M. Rosen Reads Chelsea Sutton’s Novella Krackle’s Last Movie

Being a documentary filmmaker is a bit like trying to play God. They must embark on an agonizing process of creation, sifting endlessly through old interviews, letters, journals, and other raw archival bric-a-brac, cutting and reassembling the disparate bits and pieces until they merge into a single coherent narrative. The reward is that, under the…
Haunted Passages Prose: “Moreso, Series Four” by Peter Cherches

The supermodel had a taste for ugly men of a certain age. She didn’t care if they were rich or poor, as long as they were ugly. In public places this always caused stares, stares of amazement, stares of confusion, stares of disgust. Sometimes people would actually shout things at her and her date. This…
Fiction Review: Emily Webber Reads Laura Venita Green’s Debut Novel Sister Creatures

A character in Laura Venita Green’s debut novel tells her daughter, “You’ve got to keep the wilderness at bay somehow.” Sister Creatures follows four women from the same small town, Pinecreek, in Louisiana, as they. Green blends both realistic fiction, horror, and supernatural elements as the women try to escape past trauma and toxic relationships…
Haunted Passages Short Story: “Boys Taste Better” by E Ce Miller

When Luke Cole goes missing, everyone blames his father. Classic case, folks mouth around town, in line for their lattes, their postage stamps, imagining how an estranged ex-husband might abscond with his own son to torment the kid’s mom. Most figure Luke will turn up in a week or two, sheepishly clutching a body-warmed Big…
Haunted Passages Poetry: “Aubade to the Weight of a Soul in the Morning Air” by Jenny Maaketo

I packedso high in the lightI practice for whatuntil what is an objectTo cast becomes invisible To cradle light spindle refracts rays switchgrass the grass switch my wrist with you and to hold notuntil as lightly as I find I among the mountains air I will to be you here the cast touch is caught…
Original Haunted Passages Short Story: “The Late Mrs. Cole” by Salvatore Difalco

Mrs. Cole lived down the street from us. People said she was a witch. They’d seen her flying around on a broom. And she had been spotted in Eastwood Park picking poisonous mushrooms by the back fence. She was also said to walk around the neighborhood with a shopping bag full of frogs. But most…