Riddance: Or: The Sybil Joines Vocational School for Ghost Speakers & Hearing-Mouth Children

by Shelley Jackson, Zachary Thomas Dodson (Designed by)

Overview

Finalist for the Believer Book Award for Fiction
Named a Best Book of Fall by Vulture, New York Magazine, and more

"A ravishing novel charged with the idea of the incommunicable." —The New Yorker

Eleven–year–old Jane Grandison, tormented by her stutter, sits in the back seat of a car, letter in hand inviting her to live and study at the Sybil Joines Vocational School for Ghost Speakers & Hearing–Mouth Children. Founded in 1890 by Headmistress Sybil Joines, the school—at first glance—is a sanctuary for children seeking to cure their speech impediments. Inspired by her haunted and tragic childhood, the Headmistress has other ideas.

Pioneering the field of necrophysics, the Headmistress harnesses the “gift” she and her students possess. Through their stutters, together they have the ability to channel ghostly voices communicating from the land of the dead, a realm the Headmistress herself visits at will. Things change for the school and the Headmistress when a student disappears, attracting attention from parents and police alike.

Set in the overlapping worlds of the living and the dead, Shelley Jackson’s Riddance is an illuminated novel told through theoretical writings in necrophysics, the Headmistress’s dispatches from the land of the dead, and Jane’s evolving life as Joines’s new stenographer and central figure in the Vocational School’s mysterious present, as well as its future.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781948226004
Publisher:	Catapult
Publication date:	10/16/2018
Sold by:	Penguin Random House Publisher Services
Format:	eBook
Pages:	512
File size:	9 MB

About the Author

Shelley Jackson was born in the Philippines, raised in Berkeley, California, and currently lives in Brooklyn, New York, with her husband, her daughter, and a three–legged dog. She received a B.A. in art from Stanford University and an M.F.A. in creative writing from Brown University. She is the author of the short story collection The Melancholy of Anatomy, the novel Half Life, the hypertext novel Patchwork Girl, several children’s books, and “Skin,” a story published in tattoos on the skin of more than 2,000 volunteers. She teaches in the graduate writing program at The New School.

Read an Excerpt

Chapter 6, excerpt from “The Stenographer’s Story”

“No, no, no, no, no! I said, listen with your mouth. I did not say gargle, or whatever it is you think you are doing. You, girl. Grandison!”
Still holding the rolled paper cone to my mouth and with most of my attention directed toward the vicinity of my tonsils, I did not recognize my own name until I heard it again, this time from much closer to. The instructor had stopped directly in front of me.
“Grandison, I am speaking to you. Cannot you hear me?”
Since I spoke, without thinking, through the cone, my “Yes—no—I can” came out unexpectedly loud, and muffled giggles rose from around me. I lowered the cone, flushing.
"“It is ‘yes, sir’ or ‘yes, Mr. Behalf.’ You are new here.”
“Yes, sir.”
“You have conceived a dislike for this exercise?”
“Sir?”
“You are crumpling your trumpet.” Happy laughter greeted this observation.
I looked down. I was more than crumpling it. I had crushed it into a ball and was kneading it compulsively.
“Take this one, and try to refrain from destroying it.”
“Yes, sir.” My cheeks burned.
“Now try once more, without huffing, or puffing, or gagging, or fizzing, or anything, to listen with your mouth. . . . No, no, no!”
All my life I had borne the double burden of my stutter and my skin. Coming here, though, I had thought at least to halve my load—had looked forward to the novelty of being celebrated for my stutter, instead of mocked. I now learned better. Everyone had a stutter. What mattered was how well one employed it to summon up the dead. And that I could not do at all, nor even imagine how to start. Was it all a bunco game? The exercises we did seemed pointless (and some of them hurt), the teachers’ instructions frankly nonsensical. Seeking to “breathe backward,” I might forget to breathe at all and fall off my seat in a faint, or inhale my own saliva and suffer a coughing fit. And a paper cone was not the preciousest object I destroyed in my clumsiness! Not even among my cousins had I been made to feel such a ninnyhammer. The littlest of my fellow beginners, scarcely half my age, was more adept than I.
“Von Gunten, why don’t you show Grandison how it is done? Try not to upset the furniture,” added Mr. Behalf, as a stout little girl with white-blond braids, brows, and even lashes clumped to her feet, rocking the bench as she did so.
The dutiful giggles cut off abruptly when Von Gunten raised her cone, and my participating laughter, belated and a trifle hysterical, rang out for a moment. Then there was silence. Into it, her eyes a little crossed, she fed a low, hollow note, sustained like a drone. Rather than weakening, it grew louder, and then, just when one would have expected her to run out of breath, it resolved into an adult, female voice saying forcefully but quite naturally, “No respectable girl wears crimson stockings with red morocco tie shoes, except at home or on the summer piazza.” There was a rustle as everyone, including myself, looked surreptitiously around, but no crimson stockings were in attendance. (Nor was it at all likely that any of us would be permitted so much liberty in matters of dress.)
“If we may inquire, madame or miss,” the instructor said, “what other wisdom do you have for the living?”
“Snuff-dipping is a revolting habit,” said Von Gunten, the cone trembling with effort, “that invariably leads to moral and physical dereliction. Crimson stockings . . .” Her voice grew faint and crepitating.
Mr. Behalf inclined his ear. “Stockings?” he said gently.
“Wound around my . . .” crackle crackle . . . Then, with great force: “Pulled tight!”
“Yes, quite!” he said hurriedly. “That will be enough, Von Gunten. Von Gunten, enough,” he repeated, prying open the fat little hand that had convulsed around the cone.
When I first arrived at my aunt’s house I was given a new home, new clothes, and a new body. This body had various names: stutterer, colored girl, poor relation. I did not recognize it. It seemed to me a sort of cenotaph for another body, now lost. What I still called my self flickered around this marker, homeless and very nearly voiceless.
I am loath to turn a very real affliction into a metaphor by suggesting that if I could not speak it was because I was schooled in silence. Yet I was. And if I spoke all the same, though in a Voice that said nothing, wasn’t that because there was so much not to say? A whole hullabaloo of silence, with my parents’ unspeakable marriage at the center of it. I was not to speak of my father, whom I remembered only in parts—long lovely hands, a black hat, the open collar of a white shirt—though I burned to know more, that I might stitch those parts together and understand why he had left us. (“People leave,” my mother said. Then she left, too.) I was not to speak of my paternal grandparents, born into slavery, as I presumed, and long dead. Nor of my people in general, though they were all around me, spooning tiny wrinkled potatoes onto my plate, filling my water glass, bearing away my gravy-blotched dress to be sponged and pressed—“my people” because so they would be reckoned by any stranger, not because I was invited to claim them, or they me. Of all this I was the impertinent reminder, the blot in the family Bible. My mother and Bitty had done the right thing by dying. It was too bad I had not had the grace to follow suit.
Such was Jane Grandison, age eleven: All too present, as to body. All but absent, as to voice.
Now I was instructed that this disjunct condition was in point of fact ideal. That I would never recover my lost voice, and must indeed endeavor to lose my Voice as well. Is it remarkable if every part of me refused this teaching? The information that I was “an empty space,” “a hollow,” “an opening,” had the exact opposite of its intended effect. Never had I so keenly felt myself to be a dense material body as when I was striving to fashion myself into an absence.
My resistance had a color. Was color: my blackness bound me to this body that was not my body, but a sort of pickaninny doll into which I threw a voice that also was not mine. And it seemed to me they knew it would be that way and wanted it that way. Nothingness needs somethingness to prove itself against. The spotless needs the spot. And I—my obdurate, impertinent, unmentionable body—was that spot.
Certainly I was the very worst student in the school. Again, I was an outsider, and the other children made me feel it, as other children had always done, through they did so through stutters that at the Academy for Disadvantaged Girls would have made them prey just as surely as mine had made me.
Leaning low over her plate of bread and cheese: “Hello, n-n-new girl. Grandison. Hello. Hello. Hello. Look at m-m-me. Hello! Why, you . . .” Here she sat back, struck the table with her knuckles, then drew her baby finger across her sealed mouth. The other girls nodded; one pinched off a scrap of bread and kneaded it into a ball, balanced it on one fingernail, and then flicked it into the air to appreciative laughter, an operation that I followed closely while affecting disinterest, for I did not understand these gestures, though I caught the derisive intent well enough.
Another girl took up the attack. “Listen, Grandison, I have something to tell you, no joke. Don’t you want to hear it?”
I folded my bread around my cheese and took a bite.
“You’re hurting my feelings, Grandison.”
I unfolded my bread again and began scraping the mold off my cheese.
“What, are you deaf? Rude thing! D-d-didn’t your mother teach you any manners?”
Now I looked up.
“O-o-ooh, she’s getting mad. Watch out, I think she’s going to s-s-s-summon a ghost to s-s-s-scare us!”
Then one of them summoned a ghost to scare me. In this she miscalculated, though. The spirit she called up was a great bore who started in on explaining double-entry bookkeeping as necessary background to the exciting story of an error in arithmetic that he had found in his employer’s records, “a punctiliousness for which I was not rewarded,” he complained, as his channeler sought vainly to fit a slice of buttered bread into her mouth around his words. “Quite the opposite!”
As he droned on, the girls picked up their bread and deserted their unfortunate comrade, for it was forbidden to call up a ghost without supervision, and Mother Other was already bearing down on us. I hitched myself a little farther down the bench and continued stolidly eating my lunch. I will not let them drive me out, I thought. In any case I have nowhere else to go, and I saw in my mind’s eye the retreating rear of the car that brought me, taking itself and its driver, not unkind, swiftly away, and for a moment felt a quite unmanageable grief. “But I have nowhere else to go,” I said aloud, and took a bite of bread.
“You next carry into the columns of profit and loss the balances of . . .” said the girl, as she was pulled away by the ear.
Another time I had been backed into a remote corner of the playfield by a group of white boys and girls who, by calling me, as I guessed (for their words were much garbled by their stutters and nervous laughter) a “bulldyking coon”—albeit with sidelong glances at two colored students nearby—were trying to elicit some interesting reaction. I had heard worse in Brooklyn and maintained a contemptuous silence. So did Ambrose Wilson and Maritcha Dixon, whose expressions of lofty unconcern vied to convey their elevation above ignominious me. My tormentors had resorted to plucking at my clothes and putting leaves in my hair when Miss Exiguous came hurrying up. “Grandison, I have been looking everywh—what are you doing, boys and girls?”
“We’re helping Grandison put herself in Compliance, the nasty messy thing.”
“Straighten your uniform, girl. Headmistress wants you to take down a dispatch.”
How I gloated, under my calm exterior, as I left my now-subdued tormentors. But alone in the Headmistress’s office, behind the typewriter, I experienced another sort of torment. The Headmistress’s words buzzing through the brass trumpet came so fast sometimes that I had to leave out whole sentences, or were so subsumed in static that only with the liveliest exercise of the imagination could I concoct a coherent transcript.
“Zzzzzridzzz . . . ffzzzmamzz . . . cozzzzpapazzzlllie . . .”
“The ridge of the mountain,” I typed, “is covered with papillae.”
Every time I presented my trembling sheaf of papers, I was sure of being exposed as a fictionist. So I set about forming a new program. If I could not secure my reputation with my talent for ghost-speaking, I certainly would not secure it with charm, wit, or good looks. Let others be liked, applauded, or admired: I would be useful. I schooled myself in Dr. Jameson's New Improved Phonographological Method and, whenever I was not occupied with my studies, put in hours drilling on the typewriting machine. And before too many months had gone by, I really had all the skills that I had pretended to have, and if I still fictionalized now and then it was for my own amusement and in the confidence that I would not get the sack, for I had become the Headmistress’s most accurate, most assiduous, fastest, cleverest—in short, best—stenographer, typist, and transcriptionologist. Words I often rolled over my tongue when alone, for I had never before done or been anything that took so many long words to describe.
But my chief object of study, from blank fascination as much as from method, was the headmistress herself.

Table of Contents

Editor's Introduction

1
Final Dispatch: “Borne on racing white-streaked black . . .”
The Stenographer’s Story: “The Headmistress’s tiny, tinny voice has fallen silent.”
Readings: My Childhood
Letters to Dead Authors, #1: Melville: “You will not have heard of me . . .”

2
Final Dispatch: “Someone is missing, a child is missing, calamity . . .”
The Stenographer’s Story: “Another pause. The room is quiet, though today’s events have left their spoor . . .”
Readings: from a Visitor’s Observations: How I Conceived the Plan to Visit the Vocational School; On the Architecture of the Vocational School
Letters to Dead Authors, #2: Melville: “It has come to my attention that you are dead.”

3
Final Dispatch: “[Extended static, several words indistinct] . . . someone is missing . . .”
The Stenographer’s Story: “‘Wake up!’ The Intake Coordinator, if that was what she was . . .”
Readings: from Principles of Necrophysics: The Mechanics of Channeling the Dead
Letters to Dead Authors, #3: Brontë (Charlotte): “I am—but I shall not introduce myself.”

4
Final Dispatch: “It is easy to forget what you are about, in the land of the dead . . .”
The Stenographer’s Story: “I traipsed dumbly around behind Florence . . .”
Readings: from a Visitor’s Observations: On Eating and Other Oral Activities; On Methods of Listening
Letters to Dead Authors, #4: Charlotte: “I have seized my Eve, my ‘v’!”

5
Final Dispatch: “But if we are all dead, then there is certainly no rush . . .”
The Stenographer’s Story: “Mother Other was waiting in the hall when I emerged . . .”
Readings: from a Visitor’s Observations: On Methods of Listening
Readings: The Analphabetical Choir
Letters to Dead Authors, #5: Hawthorne: “I stop by the dormitory at night to imagine the ghosts rushing in and out . . .”

6
Final Dispatch: “The road, the ravine, the fields, the . . .”
The Stenographer’s Story: “No, no, no, no, no! I said, listen with your mouth.”
Readings: from The Principles of Necrophysics: A Report on Certain Curious Objects . . .
Letters to Dead Authors, #6: E. A. Poe: “A faint hissing—snow . . .”

7
Final Dispatch: “I had never seen a person looking the way she looked . . .”
The Stenographer’s Story: “She sweeps down the hall, her heavy skirts . . .”
Readings: from a Visitor’s Observations: On Punishment; On Play
Letters to Dead Authors, #7: Brontë (Emily): “Doctor Beede tells me, one finger probing greedily . . .”

8
Final Dispatch: “I have just spent a summer in my mother’s hand.”
The Stenographer’s Story: “I was lying in my bed, putting in a little extra practice.”
Readings: from a Visitor’s Observations: On Play
Readings: Consuetudinary of the Word Church
Letters to Dead Authors, #8: Mary Shelley: “Intermediate Death Studies. The students bend their heads . . .”

9
Final Dispatch: “So I am back at the beginning of the chase.”
The Stenographer’s Story: “I swim up from sleep, frowning . . .”
Readings: from a Visitor’s Observations: On Certain Objects in the Collection; On Articles of Dress; A Secret
Letters to Dead Authors, #9: Stoker: “My voice weakens. It seems to sink back . . .”

10
Final Dispatch: “This is how it happened.”
The Stenographer’s Story: “It is customary in telling stories from school . . .”
Readings: from a Visitor’s Observations: On Articles of Dress
Readings: Early Dispatches from the Land of the Dead
Letters to Dead Authors, #10: Mina Harker: “Now it is my mother whose voice I seemed to hear.”
11

Final Dispatch: “[Crackling] Where am I?”
The Stenographer’s Story: “I have told how I gained a reputation as a necronaut . . .”
Readings: from a Visitor’s Observations: A Secret on the Patois of the Vocational School
Letters to Dead Authors, #11: Jephra: “I believe I addressed my last letter to a fictional character.”

12
Final Dispatch: “[Static, three to four sentences indistinct] . . . thought it was a piano factory . . .”
The Stenographer’s Story: “The months passed, the years.”
Readings: Documentarian of the Dead
Letters to Dead Authors, #12: Herman: “Something is going on in my school that I don’t understand.”

13
Final Dispatch: "I am down at the swampy verge of our lawn . . ."
The Stenographer’s Story: "The voice crackles, drops out, returns as pure sound . . .”
Readings: from a Visitor’s Observations: On the Patois of the Vocational School
Readings: Report on a Cemetery
Letters to Dead Authors, #13: Ishmael: “I have grown gaunt—no one knows how gaunt . . ."

14
Final Dispatch: "Well, here we are again in my office. It looks real . . ."
The Stenographer’s Story: "There is an excellent private sanatorium in Pittsfield . . .”
Readings: from The Principles of Necrophysics: The Structure of the Necrocosmos
Letters to Dead Authors, #14: Jane E.: “I have had a disappointment.”
15
Final Dispatch: “Do you hear it too? That low, cool, reasonable voice . . .”
The Stenographer’s Story: "The alarm, though we did not recognize it for what it was . . ."
Readings: from a Visitor’s Observations: On the Difficulty of My Task
Readings: from Interviews with the Dead: Or, Luncheon with a Spirit Medium
Letters to Dead Authors, #15: Jane: “At first my Theatrical Spectacle bid fair to be another disappointment . . .”

16
Final Dispatch: "I flew like a phoenix out of the fire, and like a phoenix I was reborn . . ."
The Stenographer’s Story: "The water went down, leaving the grass all slicked with mud."
Readings: from a Visitor’s Observations: On the Difficulty of My Task; A Private Conversation
Letters to Dead Authors, #16: Bartleby: "The story may have already reached you . . ."

17
Final Dispatch: "The inspector set his hat on the spindly-legged occasional table . . ."
The Stenographer’s Story: “Reader, she was dead.”

Editor's Afterword

Appendix A: Last Will and Testament
Appendix B: Instructions for Saying a Sentence
Appendix C: Ectoplasmoglyphs #1–40

Editorial Reviews

★ 08/06/2018
This clever, cacophonous novel of metaphysical gothic from Jackson (Half Life) teems with voices of the living and the dead. The Sybil Joines Vocational School is a Massachusetts institution in which children with speech impediments are taught “necrophysics,” intended to give them the ability to become “mouthpieces for the dead.” They are chosen because, according to Sybil Joines, the founding headmistress, “stuttering, like writing, is an amateur form of necromancy.” The novel comprises documents about the early history of the academy compiled by a historian: a newspaper account of the murder of a visiting school inspector that serves as the book’s central mystery; the autobiography of star student Jane Grandison, a girl who acts as the headmistress’s stenographer; and the tubercular headmistress’s “final dispatch” (or ghost-channeling session). Also included are observations from a linguistic anthropologist on the school’s quack methods, “calculated... to instill a keen sense of the insignificance of the individual and the flimsiness of his or her claim to existence.” Full of Carrollian logic and whimsical grotesquerie, the tale, which leads up to the campus slaying, is an illuminating allegory of fiction writing, for “the necrocosmos is made of language; we precipitate a world with every word we speak.” Joines is a remarkable creation in a wonderful book—an imperious, otherworldly, and damaged figure who, haunted by her childhood, devises and devotes her life to a haunted philosophy. Agent: PJ Mark, Janklow & Nesbit Assoc. (Oct.)

Publishers Weekly

Praise for Riddance

Finalist for The Believer Book Award for Fiction
Named a Best Book of Fall by Vulture, New York Magazine, and more


"A ravishing novel charged with the idea of the incommunicable." —The New Yorker

"Polyphonic." — New York

"The wildly creative Jackson . . . spins a fragmented, Gothic murder mystery." —Los Angeles Times

"Jackson’s book is a brainy but ultimately tender mystery, spinning around a fascinatingly deluded headmistress who thinks stuttering children can channel the dead; one of her star student–cultists, and the question of who offed a very unlucky school inspector." —Vulture

"At once a handbook for speaking to the dead, a harrowing, propellant story of greed and ambition, and a commonplace book of spiritualist apocrypha. Riddance should have been the talk of the book world, and of the supernatural world, when it came out; the living and the dead must correct this error at once." —Katharine Coldiron, The Rumpus

"Jackson’s experimental frame of poetic prose, documentation, and photographs, which describe the minutiae of how her characters experience the world around them, is carefully wrought, showing a deep love of language, both for herself and the world she’s created." —Jenee Skinner, The Arkansas International

"Unsettling in the best way, Riddance is a lush, gothic novel . . . Spooky old sepia–toned photos and diagrams accompany an academic’s notes in this compelling ghost story."" —Maris Kreizman, The Cut

"Immersive and deliciously haunting, this is a novel that cannot be read without being deeply felt. Like the disembodied voices conjured by the 'hearing–mouth children' who attend Sybil Joines' Vocational School, Jackson's fictive vision will challenge you and make you examine language's power as well as its potential to heal and cause harm." —Shondaland

Spine–tingling. —Bustle

"Where to begin with Riddance . . .? An exhumation of influences—19th century spiritualism, Moby–Dick, Jane Eyre, Dennis Cooper, H.P. Lovecraft—would be a start, but it wouldn’t do justice to the author’s incomparable inventiveness . . . It’s a totally unique achievement, coincident with Jackson’s status as a writer of the postmodern weird, but not dependent on it . . . Riddance enthralls and engages." —Popscure

"In Shelley Jackson’s Riddance, ghosts speak in the space between sounds in a child’s stutter. The mouth is the entrance and exit to the land of the dead; words and even objects from beyond the veil populate the boarding school where the children hone their abilities . . . The novel’s language [is] alluring [and] reflects the unknown that lies beyond, around and within us." —Paste

"Shelley Jackson’s illuminated novel delivers an original tale that will make you realize you’re closer to ghosts than you once believed." —Frannie Jackson, Paste

"Every once in a while a book comes along that merits special attention. Shelley Jackson’s Riddance; or, The Sybil Joines Vocational School for Ghost Speakers and Hearing–Mouth Children is one of those books. It’s masterfully written, wildly entertaining, incredibly clever, and a creepily thrilling good read . . . That Jackson is a master of her craft should come as no news to anyone familiar with her work but what she has done in this new novel is create a premise as original as any in modern fiction and characters as memorable as any of those referenced in the novel (Jane Eyre and Ishmael among others). The novel’s meditations on life after death or death within life, or life as death, will leave you haunted and questioning the very nature of human existence." —The Brooklyn Rail

"The works of Shelley Jackson frequently head beyond the surreal and into something uncategorizable and phantasmagorical. With this, her first novel in twelve years, Jackson tells the story of students at a school for those with speech impediments, who are utilized in a plan to contact the dead. We are suitably intrigued." —Vol. 1 Brooklyn



"Riddance is Jackson’s first novel in twelve years, and it’s as noisy, category–defying, and fantastically weird a book as a longtime Jackson fan might hope for . . . It is a big, exuberant, gleeful book, whimsical and inventive and stuffed full of wild leaps from the land of the dead to the land of the living—which, in Jackson’s world, are not so very separate at all." —Tor.com

"Riddance is a physical artifact, a material object you need to hold in your hands to fully understand. Riddance defies the existing categories we have for understanding what writing is so Jackson can make space for a new argument about what writing can do . . . Reading Riddance is an experience in being haunted, not by ghosts per se, but by the growing sense that writing itself is a haunted enterprise. Riddance is haunted by undead histories, undead traumas, undead authors, and undead words that were never really our own, that illuminate why a book is not only written, but made. The parts may be undead, but Shelley Jackson has assembled them, made them through her writing, all come to life again." —Erin Bartnett, Electric Literature

"Sit down with a cup of tea, or maybe something stronger, and get ready to shiver delightfully as you learn about a headmistress obsessed with 'necrophysics.' Sybil Joines believes she can take children with speech impediments and teach them to communicate with the dead. Her story alone would make an excellent tale, but Jackson (Half Life) and designer Zachary Thomas Dodson have expanded it with facsimiles for each document that dial up the supernatural feel . . . A ghost story, a mystery, a manifesto, a work of art—Riddance is all of these at once." —Bethanne Patrick, Literary Hub

"Both Half Life and Riddance show Shelley Jackson to be a poised and evocative stylist, one of the reasons both of these quite long books remain pleasurable to read." —Daniel Green, Full Stop

"This clever, cacophonous novel of metaphysical gothic from Jackson (Half Life) teems with voices of the living and the dead . . . Full of Carrollian logic and whimsical grotesquerie, the tale . . . is an illuminating allegory of fiction writing, for 'the necrocosmos is made of language; we precipitate a world with every word we speak.' Joines is a remarkable creation in a wonderful book—an imperious, otherworldly, and damaged figure who, haunted by her childhood, devises and devotes her life to a haunted philosophy." —Publishers Weekly (starred review)

"Not only an incredible yarn but a delightfully strange, wondrously original, and dazzlingly immersive gothic love letter to storytelling." —Booklist

“Shelley Jackson is a writer of such extraordinary, uncanny power that the hair on the back of my neck stands up when I encounter her work. What an exhilarating, prickling, blistering book Riddance is! I made myself read it as slowly as possible in order to stay in as long as I could.”—Kelly Link, author of Get in Trouble: Stories

"Wow! Riddance is an extraordinarily inventive, spooky, fascinating, surprising book. On one level a mash–up of Moby–Dick and Jane Eyre; on another, an intricate literary puzzle; and at heart, a poignant investigation of what happens when we try to make the world a better place. It simply amazed me."" —Allegra Huston, author of Say My Name and Love Child: A Memoir of Family Lost and Found

"Thomas Edison considered building a device to speak with the dead. A century later, Shelley Jackson has. This book is a ghost portal. It is also a genius work of art; a lost history; a rollicking, wondrous, Borgesian library; and a haunting so gloriously conceived, reader, you will shudder.""—Samantha Hunt, PEN/Faulkner finalist for The Dark Dark

"Riddance is a book like no other, a murder mystery channeled back from the next life, in conversation with the great authors and characters of the 1800s—Melville, the Brontë̈s, Bartleby, and Jane Eyre. Shelley Jackson has created the book I have dreamt of, a book that does not contain magic, but that is actually magic. A story that spans the divide separating the living and the dead, but that proposes death not as static but adventure. When my time comes, I hope—like her heroine Sybil—to be a necronaut."—Darcey Steinke, author of Sister Golden Hair

"You never know what Shelley Jackson is going to do next—you just know it will be something brilliant." —Tom McCarthy, author of Satin Island, short–listed for the 2015 Man Booker Prize

"A terrific piece of tragicomic fiction. Ostensibly about a 1919 murder at a vocational school for stammerers in Massachusetts, a school that doubles as a kind of spiritualism lab—young stammerers thought to be particularly adept at communicating with the dead—but more centrally about time and death, familiar targets of most fictionists, especially those of the crepuscular sort. Jackson herself channels a multitude of famous dead authors from Charlotte Brontë̈ to Samuel Beckett, producing a metafictional style that is witty, imaginative, rich with stunning metaphors, and often playfully profound. The many asides—such as the 'Documentarian of the Dead,' the forays into Principles of Necrophysics, the amazing stage show near the end of the novel—very nearly match the power of the central narrative, carried by the school’s headmistress and her stenographer, but their stories do indeed provide the harrowing climax. The book has been brilliantly produced by Black Balloon Publishing." —Robert Coover, author of Huck Out West

From the Publisher

11/01/2018

Jane Grandison is tormented by her schoolmates and family members because of her stutter—that is, until she is invited to live and study at the Sybil Joines Vocational School for Ghost Speakers and Hearing-Mouth Children. The headmistress, Sybil Joines, seeks to cure students' speech issues. She believes the dead can communicate through these students [is this ableism ever addressed? ]. This 1919 gothic tale is told from the alternating points of view of Sybil and Jane, the student-turned-stenographer. Accompanying pictures, diagrams, notes, and letters support the plot. Jackson's writing transports readers, allowing them to look past the morbidity of death and consider the other possibilities of the land of the dead. VERDICT A historical horror murder mystery that is both unexpected and imaginative; purchase where there are fans of creepy stories such as "Miss Peregrine's" books by Ransom Riggs.—Morgan O'Reilly, Riverdale Country School, NY

School Library Journal

2018-07-31

Ambitious new work from the author of Half Life (2006) and Patchwork Girl (1995).

This novel begins with an "Editor's Introduction," a fact which is sure to excite fans of postmodern gothic, but even before that, we see what looks like a photocopy of a brittle newspaper clipping describing a murder at a "school for stammerers." The fictional editor goes on to describe an uncanny series of coincidences that fuels her interest in the "Sybil Joines Vocational School for Ghost Speakers & Hearing-mouth Children." The text that follows is presented as a scholarly anthology, a mix of first-person narratives, letters, and excerpts from a variety of secondary sources. There is an audience of readers who will appreciate this book simply for existing. There is an audience of readers who will enjoy the experience of reading this book. There is also an audience of readers who will be thrilled by the idea of this novel and dreadfully disappointed by its execution. There's not much to say about the first category, and the second category will recognize itself. The suggestion that there is a third category requires explication. So…the first disappointment is that, although this novel is supposed to be composed of disparate parts, there is almost no differentiation in voice. The "Editor" sounds a lot like Sybil Joines, who sounds a lot like her stenographer, Jane Grandison. There is a formal argument to be made on behalf of this technical choice—the dead speak through the living in this book, and identities are porous—but the monotony undercuts the gothic conceit Jackson alludes to at the beginning. It's also worth noting that all these nearly indistinguishable voices are equally verbose. No detail is insignificant enough to evade careful notice. "In each perforation of my too-large oxfords, a crescent shadow waxed and waned as its angle to the light changed, or disappeared in my own larger shadow, and inside my loose black stockings, on which tiny fuzz balls clung, my ankles individually flexed and strained." This novel is more than 500 pages, and it proceeds at this pace.

Postmodern gothic made tedious.

Kirkus Reviews