Books
Gwendolyn Kiste is one of my favorite horror writers — in a large part because of the way she centers female friendships and love. Her characters and their relationships with each other are interesting and complex and messy, and this is equally true with her latest novel The Haunting of Velkwood.
When the block of homes within the Velkwood Vicinity suddenly turned into a ghostly apparition with all of the families trapped inside, only three young women (away at college at the time of the event) survived. The site became a hot spot for occultists and scientist hoping to understand the strange phenomena and how it is tied to the afterlife. Haunted by pestering reporters and by memories they’d rather keep secret, the three young women attempt to move on with their lives, with varying degrees of success.
Years later, Talitha Velkwood is alienated from her former friends and living a kind of half-life in a grungy apartment with a crappy job that barely pays the rent. The dour routine of her life is dirupted, when Jack, a new occult researched of the Velkwood phenomena, contacts her about a new project to investigate the haunted neighborhood. Exhausted by her relentless present, she agrees to return home with him in the hopes of seeing her eight-year-old sister one more time. She steps back into the void of her own home and begin to dredge up the remnants of the past — and act that brings her back into contact with her fellow survivors.
An Apparently Impossible Adventure by Laura Madeline Wiseman is a beautiful collection of poetry that explores the magical and wondrous in everyday experiences. The narrator of this collection processes the isolation of mundanity and personal loss through a longing for magic. And these prose poems feel both confessional and like a kind of spell casting, drawing the reader into their world.
At the free special exhibit opening on contemporary fairy folk art at the university art museum, I’m sure fairies are hiding behind the trees in the photograph, behind the girl, the one like your sister, with the candy cigarette. This is America, the late 1980s of outlandish white ruffles, plastic wristwatches, hair sunbleached and wild.
from “Candy, Cigarettes, and Fairies”
The lake that was an ocean, the coffee can, backseat’s chrome, hours of sun on road, flooded trees, while nude beneath bark, shimmered. The back of her head silvered-blonde, the back of hers fire-streaked, my kid sister’s big eyes, glinted. The dolls unraveled from sparkly clothes, dark self from bright others, one country’s sunrise from another’s sunset.
from “Radiance”
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