Ghost Summer: Stories

Contents

i.GRACETOWN

**** The Lake (2011)
Gracetown is a rural Florida location, just over the Georgia border; the setting for the first three stories in this collection. It's a hot and sticky, sleepy town - with a chilling dark undercurrent of supernatural influences - which boil to the surface in the summer.
In 'The Lake' we meet a schoolteacher who's decided to take a job in the town, sight unseen. We're not told exactly why she left her last position, but it's hinted right from the beginning that she might have some rather unprofessional plans concerning some of the teenage boys in her class. But things don't culminate in the way the reader might expect. The teacher is strongly drawn to the lake in back of her house, and although she's show more always been a bit timid of the water, finds herself spending more and more time swimming in the murk...
A very strong horror story - it would've been a full 5 stars from me if not for the off-stage 'appearance' of Mary Kay Letourneau, which I felt weakened the effect considerably. I also felt that I had quite a bit more sympathy for the main character than the author did.


**** Summer (2007)
A young mother's military husband is away for the summer, leaving her and the baby alone in their house in Gracetown. In the last story, 'The Lake,' we learned that swimming during the summer in Gracetown is a bad idea, and it's too bad that no one ever got around to telling the main character yet. In 'Summer' there's another failure of communication - no one tells this mother to take special care with her baby during the summer, until it's too late.
But when your bratty, temper-tantrum-throwing baby is 'possessed' by a 'visitor' that makes your child well-behaved and adorable, is it such a bad thing?
In the author's note, she describes this story as being about an "unconscionable choice," but personally, I saw it as a very logical and reasonable choice. But then, there's a reason I'm not a parent...

**** Ghost Summer (2008)
A novella-length classic ghost story. In the town of Graceland, it's well-known that children can see ghosts. One young boy is eager to visit his grandparents in Florida for the summer, hoping to catch a glimpse of an apparition. But what he discovers exceeds his expectations, as a haunting leads to an unraveling of long-lost secrets. It reveals the truth of what happened one night, back in the town's history, when fear and suspicion were escalated by hatred into an infamous race riot.

ii. THE KNOWING

**** Free Jim’s Mine (2014)
A couple, seeking to meet up with the Underground Railroad and get to the North, and freedom, seek out Free Jim. This emancipated black man, now a wealthy mine owner, had always promised to help his niece seek her freedom, but no help was ever forthcoming. Now, though, she's desperate. She and her partner agree to spend the night in the mine to avoid pursuit... and this is one scary hole in the ground.

***** The Knowing (2002)
Is knowledge power - or a curse? A boy's mother has one 'gift' - she knows the date on which everyone she sees will die. You'd think that perhaps one could leverage such knowledge, but that's not what happens here. Absolutely heartbreaking.

**** Like Daughter (2000)
One day, a woman gets an unexpected call from a distraught old friend, asking her to come take custody of her goddaughter. At first, the piece seems like it might just be retreading the tired ground of the traumas of child abuse - but there's an unexpected and powerful turn to the story.

*** Aftermoon (2004)
This might well be the most uneventful werewolf story I've ever read. Don't get me wrong, the writing is still excellent, and it's not without a few wry smiles... but the audience is more those who are concerned about body image and self-esteem issues in modern society than those interested in horror.

**** Trial Day (2003)
Powerful story, based in the author's own family history, about how fear can stop a person from doing the right thing. And a touch of dark voodoo...

iii. CARRIERS

***** Patient Zero (2000)
Post-apocalyptic/'outbreak' genre in the classic mode. Superb storytelling, but again, I have to find myself disagreeing with the author herself. In the notes she says she finds the main character's "loneliness and innocence" heartbreaking - but I would say I found his ignorance and self-centered perspective appalling (although understandable, given the circumstances.) I felt that was where the main horror of the tale lay.

***** Danger Word (with Steven Barnes) (2004)
Kick-ass zombie story! A young boy is staying with his grandfather, in a cabin out in the woods. But it soon becomes clear that this is no summer vacation trip... all is not right with the world. This was later modified and expanded into the novel 'Devil's Wake' - which I'm going to have to read.

*** Removal Order (2014)
Previously read in John Joseph Adams' 'The End is Nigh' anthology.
What this story made me think about is how very peculiar it is that our society values keeping people alive when they have no hope of recovery from illness, and they are in horrible pain. This story has that situation: a young woman has stayed in an evacuation zone to care for her dying grandmother. The situation is believable, and is dealt with in a sensible manner, but I don’t think I had the empathy with the main character that the author intended.

**** Herd Immunity (2014)
Here, we meet the same character we were introduced to in 'Removal Order,' nine months later. Nayima has become harder, tougher - she's had to do things to survive. However, she still has her dangerously stupid sentimental streak. That character trait, combined with her newfound, self-interested toughness, is a combination that's a recipe for disaster. The reader knows all's not going to end well when Nayima speaks about Typhoid Mary with sympathy.
At this point, I really hope the author isn't still intending to have her readers sympathize with Nayima. I'm not quite sure.

**** Carriers (2015)
The third 'Nayima' story. Nayima is now old - or what passes for elderly in this now-post-apocalyptic world. She's had a hard life, constantly experimented on and abused due to her immunity. She's become suspicious (understandably so) and eccentric. She can't believe that a promise could be anything more than yet another lie - but she still has her sentimental streak.

iv. VANISHINGS

**** Señora Suerte (2006)
Starting from the prompt: "What if the unluckiest man in the world met Lady Luck?" this tale emerged. Left alone without family, all his loved ones dead, suffering from the effects of a stroke, an elderly man in a nursing home insists on attending every single Bingo game in the rec room, even though he hates the game and its false cheer... but he has a reason.

****Vanishings (2015)
This last story doesn't have any supernatural or horror elements in it, but it is a sad yet heartwarming and ultimately affirming look into a family's struggles. A single mother is wrestling with raising two daughters, one of them direly ill, while trying to come to terms with the fact that her husband disappeared a year ago.


I'm coming out of reading this collection massively impressed with Due's skill and strength as a writer. I don't agree with her perspective 100% of the time - but I think that a good thing; it makes me as a reader feel that my preconceptions are challenged. There are lots of thorny and ambiguous issues here - and insights into the depths of the human heart. Beautifully done.

Many thanks to Prime Books and NetGalley for the opportunity to read. As always, my opinions are solely my own. show less

Ghosts, monsters, humans who aren't quite monsters, monsters who aren't quite human, apocalyptic diseases, and a zombie grandpa who woke me out of a sound sleep at 2am this morning convinced that if I dared cross the hall to the bathroom, I might well feel teeth tearing at my shoulder. I'm not susceptible to zombies as a rule. Sign me up for the Tananarive Due Fan Club.

Hurrah for short horror stories! I really enjoyed this collection, the first I've read by Tananarive Due. I loved that these centered around African American protags--past, present, and future. The historical bits were particularly nuanced and chilling. I also loved how she includes two sections of related short stories--"Gracetown" and "Carriers"--though at first I thought, with "Gracetown" leading off the collection, the whole book was going to be about Gracetown. I was very confused when it started going elsewhere. :) Almost always, I was left wanting more--not because the stories themselves were incomplete, but that Due created such pathos with her characters, I wanted to keep with them on their journeys. Here were my show more favorites:

-"The Lake"
-"Summer"
-"Free Jim's Mine"
-"Aftermoon" (which also made me want to reread [b: Mongrels|26156471|Mongrels|Stephen Graham Jones|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1453058849s/26156471.jpg|46113270]!)
-"Patient Zero"
-"Danger Word"
-"Removal Orders"
-"Herd Immunity"

I think it's fair to say I loved her "creature features" (if you will) most of all, but there wasn't a single story that I just didn't like. Yay for finding another author to explore! Horror month treats me well.

Note: The book itself was much longer than I anticipated--Goodreads said it's around 250 pages, but it has to be longer than that, considering there are 15 substantial stories with one being a full-blown novella (I read this on my Kindle...maybe the print has slim margins, a tiny font, or something?). show less

4.25/5

I really enjoyed this short story collection and how the stories touched on various aspects of what we, as humans, classify as horror: The supernatural, pandemics, ghosts, zombies, death of loved ones from cancer, illness, or family who leave and decide to disappear. I'd been meaning to read Tananarive Due's works for a long time, and this was the first writing of hers I'd read, but most certainly not the last!

My rating is based on the stories and the below has no influence, either way, on my rating.

I have *never* read a non-ARC (Advanced Readers Copy) final version of a book in my life that was SO chock full of errors--I'm talking not just grammatical errors and misspellings, but shifting from third person to first person on the show more same page (and not in some intentional attempted literary device way) to entire words missing from sentences to one sentence that didn't make any sense. Several short stories had multiple errors within them. I blame the editors for this, and I don't know what they were doing, but it was certainly not editing. Since most of the stories were originally published elsewhere, I don't know if the editors were lax in their retyping, or if they don't have as many staff or resources because it is a small publisher, or if they didn't give as much attention and resources to a book by a Black female author, but I was flabbergasted. show less

Confession: Past a certain point in this collection every story seemed to be about pandemics so I couldn’t finish it. However, the title novella alone made this a five-star read.

Varied and solid collection, with a nice bunch of thrilling and intriguing stories. The book is divided thematically in four sections, and although most of the stories would fit the dark fantasy/weird/horror category, the ones in the “Carriers” section (three of them sharing the same main character) are science fiction/post-apocalyptic stories, and my favorite ones by far. For instance, despite the fact that zombies are not my favorite genre, I really enjoyed the “Danger Word”, a really good zombie story in this section. I also liked the fact that in most of the stories the character’s feelings and the human relationships (family relationships, in particular) are as important, or even more important, than the eerie, science show more fictional or supernatural elements. And although there were only a couple of stories that I found brilliant, it’s also true that there was not a single one that I didn’t like at all, something not very common in this kind of collections.
Recommended particularly for dark fantasy/weird fans, but as the stories are well written and varied enough, I’m sure anyone will find a few stories that will make this book worth reading. show less

I guess I am still unstuck in time because as I read the first few pages of Ghost Summer: Stories by Tananarive Due I thought to myself just in time for black history month. Except it was March. So oops. I amended my thoughts to Just in time for International Woman's Day after I realised about half-way through Nalo Hopkinson's introduction that Ghost Summer: Stories, that Tananarive Due is female. I don't know. I can't really say I've been on the ball lately.

I feel like just going meh about this review and leaving it at that. I could have probably guessed I'd go meh after Hopkinson's Introduction, because that's how I feel about Hopkinson's work as well. I don't hate it. Just nothing grabs me. Going back to my complete obliviousness, show more I'd thought Ghost Summer: Stories would be more of horror stories, probably because of the ghost in the title. They're kind of spooky, but nothing really terrifying, so that likely added to my assessment of meh. The stories don't necessarily speak to my experience, which is fine; I don't expect all books and all stories to be geared towards me. Perhaps if I were a WOC, specifically a black woman from the Southern US, I would feel some of the horror more acutely, like how certain stressors (like reactions to racist violence) can be passed down bloodlines.

But the real meh for me comes in the fact that most of these stories are less self-contained stories than starting points. Due can set up such a intriguing idea and then the story just ends. Reading Ghost Summer: Stories is like talking to that friend of yours who has so many cool ideas and then just doesn't do anything with them. There's a story about a disagreeable baby who gets possessed by a calming spirit and that's it. The baby gets possessed. Nothing more. There's a story about a boy who knows the day he's going to die. It's in four years. That's it. Nothing more. There's a story about a boy in quarantine who is a Patient Zero for an epidemic. Then his doors are left unlocked, so he walks out of the ward. That's it. Nothing more. See what I mean? All these are just the starting point. They aren't stories. They are half-stories, a whole (in my copy) two hundred and seventy three pages of starts with not one of those pages devoted to a proper ending. Not even ambiguous thought-provoking or discussion-provoking endings. Just stops. It's crazy-making!

The most interesting part of this collection is the, for lack of a better word, bios Due writes at the end of the each story, about why or where or how she wrote the stories. At least those are more complete than the stories themselves.

Ghost Summer: Stories is a great poster-child for the We Need Diverse Books movement. I'm glad I read it. But I can't say I'm really happy with the stories themselves. Maybe short fiction just isn't where Due should be since her ideas need more room to grow.

Ghost Summer: Stories by Tananarive Due went on sale September 15, 2015.

I received a copy free from Netgalley in exchange for an honest review. show less