Riddance (eBook)

"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 bookRiddance is! I made myself read it as slowly as possible in order to stay in as long as I could." Kelly Link, author ofGet in Trouble: Stories, finalist for the 2016 Pulitzer Prize in Fiction

"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 forThe Dark Dark

The first new novel in twelve years fromHalf Life author Shelley Jackson,Riddance is a disquieting supernatural investigation into life after death

Eleven-year-old Jane Grandison, tormented by her stutter, sits in the backseat 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 schoolat first glanceis 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 JacksonsRiddance is an illuminated novel told through theoretical writings in necrophysics, the Headmistresss dispatches from the land of the dead, and Janes evolving life as Joiness new stenographer and central figure in the Vocational Schools mysterious present, as well as its future.