A Good Haunting: Stories
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Description
A beautifully written and often speculative story collection infused with Caribbean and African myths and cultures, exploring love, betrayal, motherhood, death, and home.
GROUNDED IN CONTEMPORARY LIFE AND INFUSED WITH TRADITIONS of Africa and the Caribbean, A Good Haunting: Stories spins myth, magic, and realism into heartrending tales of characters seeking love and connection. Death is the primary antagonist in each of these stories, sometimes appearing as death of self, other times as death of a loved one, and often as both.
In the title story, “A Good Haunting,” a widower in the midst of an unorthodox death ritual uses humor to deal with grief and guilt while coming to terms with unsavory details about his spouse’s sudden death. In “The Way of the Volt,” an eighteenth-century African queen is made immortal, sold into slavery, and left to face a series of impossible choices that force her to struggle with what it means to be human. In “The Sunset Toll,” members of the last community on earth disappear one by one until there are just three people left, trying to maintain hope even as they question the forces that keep them trapped on earth.
The characters wrestle with foes, agonize at crossroads, and face painful truths, all while grappling with grief, love, betrayal, motherhood, and ideas of home. Some triumph, some do not—but they all emerge irrevocably changed by their experiences.
Praise for A Good Haunting: Stories
This ghostly collection about death, motherhood, and impossible choices is perfect for fans of Beloved.
— Booklist
Across nine stories, Mitchell’s characters confront loss and fear, but they also search for connection. Some succeed, some do not, and none leave their experiences unchanged. The result is speculative fiction grounded not in escape from ordinary life, but in a closer examination of the pressures, histories, and relationships that make ordinary life matter. The supernatural gives those familiar human pressures a new shape and greater urgency.
— Women’s Journal
Gothic turns abound in Carol Mitchell’s compelling short story collection, which plumbs the isolation of people’s lives through the vehicle of supernatural elements, historical atrocity and its reverberations, and relationships filled with painful disconnection . . . The eerie, affecting stories in A Good Haunting extend the notion of what constitutes horror.
— Foreword Reviews
Blending human drama with the supernatural, Carol Mitchell has brought forth a great collection of stories in A Good Haunting.
— BVS Reviews
Carol Mitchell’s masterfully crafted tales are mined from the marrow of horrors both ordinary and extraordinary, told with poetic insight and, at times, wicked humor. A fantastic collection!
— Tananarive Due, author of The Reformatory
I'm awed by Carol Mitchell's prose and utterly compelled by the hauntings—real and imagined, personal and structural—that run through A Good Haunting. This is masterful storytelling, straddling memory and myth, tradition and self-actualization. A stunning addition to my bookshelf of Caribbean short story collections.
— Alexia Arthurs, author of How to Love a Jamaican
Caribbean islands have always seethed with ghosts and Carol Mitchell's eerie short story collection welcomes them to the page. Swirling with the lives and voices of women facing rupture and revelation, A Good Haunting transports the reader across oceans, time, and landscapes to settings where the uncanny is commonplace. Original and provocative.
— Diana McCaulay, author of A House for Miss Pauline
Each story in Carol Mitchell’s masterful collection, A Good Haunting, is an immersive page-turner. In unforgettable prose, she transports the reader to vivid worlds that speak to the human condition. Surreal, dark, and full of life, these stories will stay with you long after you’ve read the final page.
— Ghassan Zeineddine, author of Dearborn
