Short Fiction

Dreams of the Ghost House in Black Sheep Magazine

My latest short story is in the new issue of Black Sheep, on sale now! Read an excerpt below and pick up your copy of the magazine (digital or physical) here.


There were only two homes on Lost Loon Lake, the Arthur’s sleek modern summer house and a gimcrack mansion directly across the water, half shrouded in pine and time. Its cracked and peeling Georgian columns and rococo balustrades spoke to a bygone era of old money, when for the ultra-wealthy bigger was always better. That place had two names and the first was Autumnhall, enormous and empty.

The older people of the nearby town (if twenty miles can be said to be near) rarely spoke of it, and even then, only to comment on something else. Brodie had heard his mother or his aunt or the women at the diner saying things like, “Don’t run around with Charlie Mayse, he takes girls past Autumnhall and dumps them come spring.” Or “Lord, I tell you she can’t keep a house! Her place puts Autumhall to shame.”

They used it like a ward, as if to diminish it in their minds. The younger people in town were nowhere near as reserved and it seemed like there was always some new wrinkle being added to the legend of The Ghost House on October playgrounds or whispered on late and wild drunken teenage nights.

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Poetry

What Walks Here, Walks Alone (Audio)

This is a quick reading I did of a previously unpublished poem, set to silent film footage.

 

Written, performed, and produced by Mack W. Mani

Video: Alice in Wonderland (1903) courtesy of Archive.org

The title is taken from The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson

The phrase “black chests and high back chairs” was lifted from the poem The Prophet’s Paradise by Robert W. Chambers

Special Thanks:

Jordan Seider & Elizabeth Laws

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