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

SPOOKY-BOOKTOBER CONTINUES!!!! When I myself am dead matter, I will speak the language of things. Then at last I will understand what it is that the world has been trying to tell me, all my life. writer/artist shelley jackson is experimental AF. one of the pioneers of the hypertext novel, she has also......more

Extremely and entirely my shit. Like the X-men but seancepunk. Like Mary Caponegro meets Lovecraft, minus the racism. Like Miss Peregrine's rewritten by Victor LaValle. Like Tom McCarthy's incredible C, but leaning way way into the necro-hermeneutics. Like nothing and nobody else but Shelley Jackson......more

A gothic epistolary novel that was unlike anything I have read. The photographs and diagrams were eerie and added a spooky atmosphere to the documents and letters. This book needs a bigger audience. It was a unique reading experience that gave me unsettling dreams.......more

Like Jackson's art projects, Riddance is packed with fascinating ideas on how language and text is/can be delivered and perceived. The (often horrifically) unreliable narrators are oddly lovable despite their foibles. Dubious hypotheses are obsessively pursued, tested, and documented. Exchanges like......more

Good idea. Excellent idea actually. But so incredibly tedious. The author has a wide-ranging vocabulary, and not just in the field of necromancy, etc. I don't think it's a good idea to use a $20 word when a $1 or even a $5 word will do. She seems to go out of her way to use the most arcane and erudi......more