A beautifully written and often speculative story collection infused with Caribbean and African myths and cultures, exploring love, betrayal, motherhood, death, and home.
GROUNDED IN CONTEMPORARY LIFE AND INFUSED WITH TRADITIONS of Africa and the Caribbean, A Good Haunting: Stories spins myth, magic, and realism into heartrending tales of characters seeking love and connection. Death is the primary antagonist in each of these stories, sometimes appearing as death of self, other times as death of a loved one, and often as both.
In the title story, “A Good Haunting,” a widower in the midst of an unorthodox death ritual uses humor to deal with grief and guilt while coming to terms with unsavory details about his spouse’s sudden death. In “The Way of the Volt,” an eighteenth-century African queen is made immortal, sold into slavery, and left to face a series of impossible choices that force her to struggle with what it means to be human. In “The Sunset Toll,” members of the last community on earth disappear one by one until there are just three people left, trying to maintain hope even as they question the forces that keep them trapped on earth.
The characters wrestle with foes, agonize at crossroads, and face painful truths, all while grappling with grief, love, betrayal, motherhood, and ideas of home. Some triumph, some do not—but they all emerge irrevocably changed by their experiences.
Carol Mitchell is the author of the short story collection A Good Haunting: Stories, the novel What Start Bad a Mornin’, and nineteen books for children. Her book reviews and short stories have appeared in numerous journals. She holds an MFA and is a fellow of the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts and several other arts institutions. By day, Mitchell teaches writing to support her current nightly obsession: working on her new novel.
Mitchell will be in conversation with Lisa Page, co-editor of We Wear The Mask: 15 True Stories of Passing in America, (Beacon Press). Her work has appeared in The Atlantic, LitHub Weekly, The Crisis, Virginia Quarterly Review, American Short Fiction, Playboy, the Washington Post Book World, Playbill, The Chicago Tribune, and other publications and anthologies, including Skin Deep: Black Women & White Women Write About Race (Doubleday). She has worked as a freelance writer, editor, speechwriter, lyricist, instructor, actor and literary consultant. She created the Playboy College Fiction Contest. She is the former President of the PEN/Faulkner Foundation. Lisa Page is assistant professor of English and Director of Creative Writing at the George Washington University where she previously served as Interim Director of Africana Studies. She is also a resident faculty member of the Yale Writers’ Workshop. She lives outside Washington, DC.