Riddance. Shelley Jackson

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      Praise for Riddance

      Named a Best Book of Fall by Vulture, New York magazine, and more

      “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

      “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

      “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

      “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

      “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

      “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 Brontës, 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

      This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

      Copyright © 2018 by Shelley Jackson

      First published in the United States in 2018 by Black Balloon, an imprint of Catapult (catapult.co)

      First paperback edition: 2019

      All rights reserved

      Cover and book design by Zach Dodson, assisted by Veera Krouglov

      Paperback ISBN: 978-1-948226-36-3

      Hardcover ISBN: 978-1-936787-99-9

      Catapult titles are distributed to the trade by Publishers Group West

      Phone: 866-400-5351

      Library of Congress Control Number: 2018903614

      Printed in the United States of America

      10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

      For Shibire,

      who will read it someday

      Contents

       Editor’s Introduction

       1

       The 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

       The 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 . . .”

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