There are many reasons why people come to The Angelsea, a rooming house set near the beach. Some come to sleep, because at The Angelsea, you sleep like the dead. Some are seeking solitude, such as Dora. Looking for a place to escape reality for a while, Dora instead finds herself in a haunted place, haunted by the desperate souls speaking through the other sleeping inhabitants.
Dora begins to fear sleeping. She’s afraid that the ghosts of her daughters will speak to her through the others. She dreads even hearing the words “it’s all your fault we’re dead”.
But then, Dora would do anything just to hear their voices, one more time.
Why we’re excited about this book:
Australia’s Kaaron Warren has been writing deliciously creepy stories for years, and recently her fiction has been getting a lot of notice outside her continent. Author of Slights, Walking the Tree, Mistification, The Grief Hole, and Tide of Stone, her short fiction has been collected into several volumes, including Through Splintered Walls, The Grinding House, Dead Sea Fruit, and The Gate Theory. With this latest novella, Warren presents us with a personal haunting, exploring grief, loss, and guilt with careful attention to detail and a voice all her own. Tim Waggoner (The Mouth of the Dark, They Kill) says: “Beautifully written and profoundly disturbing, an evocative meditation on sorrow and loss, a ghost story in which the most terrifying specters come from within.”
Why Kaaron’s excited about this book:
“Into Bones Like Oil is a story that’s been cooking for a long time. Like many writers, I gather snippets of inspiration for stories from all over, sometimes collecting for years until they coalesce. I’ve already written two stories set in a rooming house, inspired by an intense one week stay in one about 25 years ago. It was an absolute deepdive glimpse into another life, away from my own safe suburban one, and came at a time when I was intensely creating, pouring out words that seemed to come from my gut.
It was the people there, and the way they formed routines even in that transient place. I gradually filled that rooming house with my own characters, strangers who’d sparked something in me, who deserved a place there. Larry was at a gig I went to, dressed the way he is in the novella, a strong man in his 60s, powerful even in an environment in which he was out of place. Roy came from an old photo of a man on a bicycle. Freesia is inspired by a shop customer, a woman who desperately wanted to be a free spirit but really wasn’t.
I also gathered stories about disappearances, where they were ‘last seen’ near a rooming house. There are surprisingly many of those. So I’m excited to have written my rooming house novella at last, and I’m thrilled that Meerkat Press bought it and gave it such a perfect cover.”
Forthcoming from Meerkat Press, Into Bones Like Oil by Kaaron Warren releases 12 November 2019 and is available for pre-order now.
BOB PASTORELLA