Available:*
Library | Call Number | Status |
---|---|---|
Searching... Hardwood Creek Library (Forest Lake) | FICTION JAC | Searching... Unknown |
Searching... R.H. Stafford Library (Woodbury) | FICTION JAC | Searching... Unknown |
Searching... Wildwood Library (Mahtomedi) | FICTION JAC | Searching... Unknown |
Bound With These Titles
On Order
Summary
Summary
Finalist for the Believer Book Award for Fiction
Named a Best Book of Fall by Vulture , New York Magazine , and more
"A ravishing novel charged with the idea of the incommunicable." -- The New Yorker
Eleven-year-old Jane Grandison, tormented by her stutter, sits in the back seat 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 school--at first glance--is 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 Jackson's Riddance is an illuminated novel told through theoretical writings in necrophysics, the Headmistress's dispatches from the land of the dead, and Jane's evolving life as Joines's new stenographer and central figure in the Vocational School's mysterious present, as well as its future.
Author Notes
Shelley Jackson studied at Brown University and now lives in New York City.
Reviews (4)
Publisher's Weekly Review
This clever, cacophonous novel of metaphysical gothic from Jackson (Half Life) teems with voices of the living and the dead. The Sybil Joines Vocational School is a Massachusetts institution in which children with speech impediments are taught "necrophysics," intended to give them the ability to become "mouthpieces for the dead." They are chosen because, according to Sybil Joines, the founding headmistress, "stuttering, like writing, is an amateur form of necromancy." The novel comprises documents about the early history of the academy compiled by a historian: a newspaper account of the murder of a visiting school inspector that serves as the book's central mystery; the autobiography of star student Jane Grandison, a girl who acts as the headmistress's stenographer; and the tubercular headmistress's "final dispatch" (or ghost-channeling session). Also included are observations from a linguistic anthropologist on the school's quack methods, "calculated... to instill a keen sense of the insignificance of the individual and the flimsiness of his or her claim to existence." Full of Carrollian logic and whimsical grotesquerie, the tale, which leads up to the campus slaying, is an illuminating allegory of fiction writing, for "the necrocosmos is made of language; we precipitate a world with every word we speak." Joines is a remarkable creation in a wonderful book-an imperious, otherworldly, and damaged figure who, haunted by her childhood, devises and devotes her life to a haunted philosophy. Agent: PJ Mark, Janklow & Nesbit Assoc. (Oct.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Booklist Review
The first time she channeled the dead, Sybil Joines was a young girl with a violent stutter. In 1890, she founded the Sybil Joines Vocational School for Ghost Speakers and Hearing-Mouth Children. Now, headmistress Joines hones speech impediments believed to generate local fluctuations in the directionality of time to trek freely between the lands of the living and dead and train students in the delicate art of necromancy. Yet lately, Joines' methods have come under scrutiny, and a particularly promising student has vanished altogether. But when Joines flees to the land of the dead to rescue her, she must also confront her own tragic past, dubious future, and the increasingly precarious foundation on which they both rely. Cleverly mimicking the often discordant communications of the dead, Jackson's (Half Life , 2006) narrative alternates between Joines' dispatches from beyond the veil, student and stenographer Jane Grandison's recollections, letters, necrophysic readings, and more. Throughout it all, Jackson and Joines' (are their shared initials pure coincidence?) spin not only an incredible yarn but a delightfully strange, wondrously original, and dazzlingly immersive gothic love letter to storytelling itself.--Briana Shemroske Copyright 2018 Booklist
School Library Journal Review
Jane Grandison is tormented by her schoolmates and family members because of her stutter-that is, until she is invited to live and study at the Sybil Joines Vocational School for Ghost Speakers and Hearing-Mouth Children. The headmistress, Sybil Joines, seeks to cure students' speech issues. She believes the dead can communicate through these students [is this ableism ever addressed? ]. This 1919 gothic tale is told from the alternating points of view of Sybil and Jane, the student-turned-stenographer. Accompanying pictures, diagrams, notes, and letters support the plot. Jackson's writing transports readers, allowing them to look past the morbidity of death and consider the other possibilities of the land of the dead. VERDICT A historical horror murder mystery that is both unexpected and imaginative; purchase where there are fans of creepy stories such as "Miss Peregrine's" books by Ransom Riggs.-Morgan O'Reilly, Riverdale Country School, NY © Copyright 2018. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Kirkus Review
Ambitious new work from the author of Half Life (2006) and Patchwork Girl (1995).This novel begins with an "Editor's Introduction," a fact which is sure to excite fans of postmodern gothic, but even before that, we see what looks like a photocopy of a brittle newspaper clipping describing a murder at a "school for stammerers." The fictional editor goes on to describe an uncanny series of coincidences that fuels her interest in the "Sybil Joines Vocational School for Ghost Speakers Hearing-mouth Children." The text that follows is presented as a scholarly anthology, a mix of first-person narratives, letters, and excerpts from a variety of secondary sources. There is an audience of readers who will appreciate this book simply for existing. There is an audience of readers who will enjoy the experience of reading this book. There is also an audience of readers who will be thrilled by the idea of this novel and dreadfully disappointed by its execution. There's not much to say about the first category, and the second category will recognize itself. The suggestion that there is a third category requires explication. Sothe first disappointment is that, although this novel is supposed to be composed of disparate parts, there is almost no differentiation in voice. The "Editor" sounds a lot like Sybil Joines, who sounds a lot like her stenographer, Jane Grandison. There is a formal argument to be made on behalf of this technical choicethe dead speak through the living in this book, and identities are porousbut the monotony undercuts the gothic conceit Jackson alludes to at the beginning. It's also worth noting that all these nearly indistinguishable voices are equally verbose. No detail is insignificant enough to evade careful notice. "In each perforation of my too-large oxfords, a crescent shadow waxed and waned as its angle to the light changed, or disappeared in my own larger shadow, and inside my loose black stockings, on which tiny fuzz balls clung, my ankles individually flexed and strained." This novel is more than 500 pages, and it proceeds at this pace.Postmodern gothic made tedious. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Excerpts
Excerpts
Chapter 6, excerpt from "The Stenographer's Story" "No, no, no, no, no! I said, listen with your mouth. I did not say gargle, or whatever it is you think you are doing. You, girl. Grandison!" Still holding the rolled paper cone to my mouth and with most of my attention directed toward the vicinity of my tonsils, I did not recognize my own name until I heard it again, this time from much closer to. The instructor had stopped directly in front of me. "Grandison, I am speaking to you. Cannot you hear me?" Since I spoke, without thinking, through the cone, my "Yes--no--I can" came out unexpectedly loud, and muffled giggles rose from around me. I lowered the cone, flushing. ""It is ' yes, sir ' or 'yes, Mr. Behalf .' You are new here." "Yes, sir." "You have conceived a dislike for this exercise?" "Sir?" "You are crumpling your trumpet." Happy laughter greeted this observation. I looked down. I was more than crumpling it. I had crushed it into a ball and was kneading it compulsively. "Take this one, and try to refrain from destroying it." "Yes, sir." My cheeks burned. "Now try once more, without huffing, or puffing, or gagging, or fizzing, or anything, to listen with your mouth . . . . No, no, no!" All my life I had borne the double burden of my stutter and my skin. Coming here, though, I had thought at least to halve my load--had looked forward to the novelty of being celebrated for my stutter, instead of mocked. I now learned better. Everyone had a stutter. What mattered was how well one employed it to summon up the dead. And that I could not do at all, nor even imagine how to start. Was it all a bunco game? The exercises we did seemed pointless (and some of them hurt), the teachers' instructions frankly nonsensical. Seeking to "breathe backward," I might forget to breathe at all and fall off my seat in a faint, or inhale my own saliva and suffer a coughing fit. And a paper cone was not the preciousest object I destroyed in my clumsiness! Not even among my cousins had I been made to feel such a ninnyhammer. The littlest of my fellow beginners, scarcely half my age, was more adept than I. "Von Gunten, why don't you show Grandison how it is done? Try not to upset the furniture," added Mr. Behalf, as a stout little girl with white-blond braids, brows, and even lashes clumped to her feet, rocking the bench as she did so. The dutiful giggles cut off abruptly when Von Gunten raised her cone, and my participating laughter, belated and a trifle hysterical, rang out for a moment. Then there was silence. Into it, her eyes a little crossed, she fed a low, hollow note, sustained like a drone. Rather than weakening, it grew louder, and then, just when one would have expected her to run out of breath, it resolved into an adult, female voice saying forcefully but quite naturally, "No respectable girl wears crimson stockings with red morocco tie shoes, except at home or on the summer piazza." There was a rustle as everyone, including myself, looked surreptitiously around, but no crimson stockings were in attendance. (Nor was it at all likely that any of us would be permitted so much liberty in matters of dress.) "If we may inquire, madame or miss," the instructor said, "what other wisdom do you have for the living?" "Snuff-dipping is a revolting habit," said Von Gunten, the cone trembling with effort, "that invariably leads to moral and physical dereliction. Crimson stockings . . ." Her voice grew faint and crepitating. Mr. Behalf inclined his ear. "Stockings?" he said gently. "Wound around my . . ." crackle crackle . . . Then, with great force: " Pulled tight! " "Yes, quite!" he said hurriedly. "That will be enough, Von Gunten. Von Gunten, enough," he repeated, prying open the fat little hand that had convulsed around the cone. When I first arrived at my aunt's house I was given a new home, new clothes, and a new body. This body had various names: stutterer, colored girl, poor relation. I did not recognize it. It seemed to me a sort of cenotaph for another body, now lost. What I still called my self flickered around this marker, homeless and very nearly voiceless. I am loath to turn a very real affliction into a metaphor by suggesting that if I could not speak it was because I was schooled in silence. Yet I was. And if I spoke all the same, though in a Voice that said nothing, wasn't that because there was so much not to say? A whole hullabaloo of silence, with my parents' unspeakable marriage at the center of it. I was not to speak of my father, whom I remembered only in parts--long lovely hands, a black hat, the open collar of a white shirt--though I burned to know more, that I might stitch those parts together and understand why he had left us. ("People leave," my mother said. Then she left, too.) I was not to speak of my paternal grandparents, born into slavery, as I presumed, and long dead. Nor of my people in general, though they were all around me, spooning tiny wrinkled potatoes onto my plate, filling my water glass, bearing away my gravy-blotched dress to be sponged and pressed--"my people" because so they would be reckoned by any stranger, not because I was invited to claim them, or they me. Of all this I was the impertinent reminder, the blot in the family Bible. My mother and Bitty had done the right thing by dying. It was too bad I had not had the grace to follow suit. Such was Jane Grandison, age eleven: All too present, as to body. All but absent, as to voice. Now I was instructed that this disjunct condition was in point of fact ideal. That I would never recover my lost voice, and must indeed endeavor to lose my Voice as well. Is it remarkable if every part of me refused this teaching? The information that I was "an empty space," "a hollow," "an opening," had the exact opposite of its intended effect. Never had I so keenly felt myself to be a dense material body as when I was striving to fashion myself into an absence. My resistance had a color. Was color: my blackness bound me to this body that was not my body, but a sort of pickaninny doll into which I threw a voice that also was not mine. And it seemed to me they knew it would be that way and wanted it that way. Nothingness needs somethingness to prove itself against. The spotless needs the spot. And I--my obdurate, impertinent, unmentionable body--was that spot. Certainly I was the very worst student in the school. Again, I was an outsider, and the other children made me feel it, as other children had always done, through they did so through stutters that at the Academy for Disadvantaged Girls would have made them prey just as surely as mine had made me. Leaning low over her plate of bread and cheese: "Hello, n-n-new girl. Grandison. Hello. Hello. Hello. Look at m-m-me. Hello! Why, you . . ." Here she sat back, struck the table with her knuckles, then drew her baby finger across her sealed mouth. The other girls nodded; one pinched off a scrap of bread and kneaded it into a ball, balanced it on one fingernail, and then flicked it into the air to appreciative laughter, an operation that I followed closely while affecting disinterest, for I did not understand these gestures, though I caught the derisive intent well enough. Another girl took up the attack. "Listen, Grandison, I have something to tell you, no joke. Don't you want to hear it?" I folded my bread around my cheese and took a bite. "You're hurting my feelings, Grandison." I unfolded my bread again and began scraping the mold off my cheese. "What, are you deaf? Rude thing! D-d-didn't your mother teach you any manners?" Now I looked up. "O-o-ooh, she's getting mad. Watch out, I think she's going to s-s-s-summon a ghost to s-s-s-scare us!" Then one of them summoned a ghost to scare me. In this she miscalculated, though. The spirit she called up was a great bore who started in on explaining double-entry bookkeeping as necessary background to the exciting story of an error in arithmetic that he had found in his employer's records, "a punctiliousness for which I was not rewarded," he complained, as his channeler sought vainly to fit a slice of buttered bread into her mouth around his words. "Quite the opposite!" As he droned on, the girls picked up their bread and deserted their unfortunate comrade, for it was forbidden to call up a ghost without supervision, and Mother Other was already bearing down on us. I hitched myself a little farther down the bench and continued stolidly eating my lunch. I will not let them drive me out, I thought. In any case I have nowhere else to go, and I saw in my mind's eye the retreating rear of the car that brought me, taking itself and its driver, not unkind, swiftly away, and for a moment felt a quite unmanageable grief. "But I have nowhere else to go," I said aloud, and took a bite of bread. "You next carry into the columns of profit and loss the balances of . . ." said the girl, as she was pulled away by the ear. Another time I had been backed into a remote corner of the playfield by a group of white boys and girls who, by calling me, as I guessed (for their words were much garbled by their stutters and nervous laughter) a "bulldyking coon"--albeit with sidelong glances at two colored students nearby--were trying to elicit some interesting reaction. I had heard worse in Brooklyn and maintained a contemptuous silence. So did Ambrose Wilson and Maritcha Dixon, whose expressions of lofty unconcern vied to convey their elevation above ignominious me. My tormentors had resorted to plucking at my clothes and putting leaves in my hair when Miss Exiguous came hurrying up. "Grandison, I have been looking everywh--what are you doing, boys and girls?" "We're helping Grandison put herself in Compliance, the nasty messy thing." "Straighten your uniform, girl. Headmistress wants you to take down a dispatch." How I gloated, under my calm exterior, as I left my now-subdued tormentors. But alone in the Headmistress's office, behind the typewriter, I experienced another sort of torment. The Headmistress's words buzzing through the brass trumpet came so fast sometimes that I had to leave out whole sentences, or were so subsumed in static that only with the liveliest exercise of the imagination could I concoct a coherent transcript. "Zzzzzridzzz . . . ffzzzmamzz . . . cozzzzpapazzzlllie . . ." "The ridge of the mountain," I typed, "is covered with papillae." Every time I presented my trembling sheaf of papers, I was sure of being exposed as a fictionist. So I set about forming a new program. If I could not secure my reputation with my talent for ghost-speaking, I certainly would not secure it with charm, wit, or good looks. Let others be liked, applauded, or admired: I would be useful. I schooled myself in Dr. Jameson's New Improved Phonographological Method and, whenever I was not occupied with my studies, put in hours drilling on the typewriting machine. And before too many months had gone by, I really had all the skills that I had pretended to have, and if I still fictionalized now and then it was for my own amusement and in the confidence that I would not get the sack, for I had become the Headmistress's most accurate, most assiduous, fastest, cleverest--in short, best--stenographer, typist, and transcriptionologist. Words I often rolled over my tongue when alone, for I had never before done or been anything that took so many long words to describe. But my chief object of study, from blank fascination as much as from method, was the headmistress herself. Excerpted from Riddance by Shelley Jackson All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
Table of Contents
Editor's Introduction | p. 3 |
1 The Final Dispatch: "Borne on racing white-streaked black." | p. 15 |
The Stenographer's Story: "The Headmistress's tiny, tinny voice has fallen silent." | |
Readings: "My Childhood" | |
Letters to Dead Authors, #1: Melville. "You will not have heard of me..." | |
2 The Final Dispatch: "Someone is missing, a child is missing, calamity..." | p. 65 |
The Stenographer's Story: "Another pause. The room is quiet, though today's events have left their spoor..." | |
Readings: from "A Visitor's Observations." How I Conceived the Plan to Visit the Vocational School; On the Architecture of the Vocational School | |
Letters to Dead Authors, #2: Melville. "It has come to my attention that you are dead." | |
3 The Final Dispatch: "[Extended static, several words indistinct]...someone is missing..." | p. 93 |
The Stenographer's Story: "'Wake up!' The Intake-Coordinator, if that was what she was..." | |
Readings: from Principles of Necrophysics: "The Mechanics of Channeling the Dead" | |
Letters to Dead Authors, #3: Brontë (Charlotte). "I am-but I shall not introduce myself." | |
4 The Final Dispatch: "It is easy to forget what you are about, in the land of the dead." | p. 119 |
The Stenographer's Story: "I traipsed dumbly around behind Florence..." | |
Readings: from "A Visitor's Observations." On Eating and Other Oral Activities | |
Letters to Dead Authors, #4: Charlotte. "I have seized my Eve, my "V'!" | |
5 The Final Dispatch: "But if we are all dead, then there is certainly no rush..." | p. 139 |
The Stenographer's Story: "Mother Other was waiting in the hall when I emerged." | |
Readings: from "A Visitor's Observations." On Methods of Listening | |
Letters to Dead Authors, #5: Hawthorne. "I stop by the dormitory at night to imagine the ghosts rushing in and out..." | |
6 The Final Dispatch: "The road, the ravine, the fields, the..." | p. 169 |
The Stenographer's Story: "'No, no, no, no, no! I said, listen with your mouth.'" | |
Readings: from Principles of Necrophyaics: "A Report on Certain Curious Objects..." | |
Letters to Dead Authors, #6: E. A. Poe. "The Cheesehill Gazette has published a defamatory letter..." | |
7 The Final Dispatch: "I had never seen a person looking the way she looked..." | |
The Stenographer's Story: "She sweeps down the hall, her heavy skirts..." | |
Readings: from "A Visitor's Observations." On Punishment | |
Letters to Dead Authors, #7: Brontë (Emily). "Doctor Beede tells me, one finger probing greedily..." | |
8 The Final Dispatch: "I have just spent a summer in my mother's hand." | |
The Stenographer's Story: "I was lying in my bed, putting in a little extra practice" | |
Readings: from "A Visitor's Observations." On Play | |
Letters to Dead Authors, #8: Mary Shelley. "Intermediate Death Studies. The students bend their heads..." | |
9 The Final Dispatch: "So I am back at the beginning of the chase." | |
The Stenographer's Story: "I swim up from sleep, frowning..." | |
Readings: from "A Visitor's Observations." On Certain Objects in the Collection | |
Letters to Dead Authors, #9: Stoker. "My voice weakens. It seems to sink back..." | |
10 The Final Dispatch: "This is how it happened." | p. 253 |
The Stenographer's Story: "It is customary in telling stories from school..." | |
Readings: from "A Visitor's Observations." On Articles of Dress | |
Letters to Dead Authors, #10: Mina Harker. "Now it is my mother whose voice I seemed to hear." | |
11 The Final Dispatch: "[Crackling:] Where am I?" | p. 271 |
The Stenographer's Story: "I have told how I gained a reputation as a necronaut..." | |
Readings: from "A Visitor's Observations." A Secret | |
Letters to Dead Authors, #11: Jephra. "There has been another libelous letter in the Gazette." | |
12 The Final Dispatch: "[Static, three or four sentences indistinct]...thought it was a piano factory..." | p. 299 |
The Stenographer's Story: "The months passed, the years." | |
Readings: "Documentarian of the Dead" | |
Letters to Dead Authors, #12: Herman. "Something is going on in my school that I don't understand." | |
13 The Final Dispatch: "I am down at the swampy verge of our lawn..." | p. 325 |
The Stenographer's Story: "The voice crackles, drops out, returns as pure sound..." | |
Readings: from "A Visitor's Observations." On the Patois of the Vocational School | |
Letters to Dead Authors, #13: Ishmael. "I have grown gaunt-no one knows how gaunt..." | |
14 The Final Dispatch: "Well, here we are again in my office. It looks real..." | p. 363 |
The Stenographer's Story: "'There is an excellent private sanatorium in Pittsfield...'" | |
Readings: from Principles of Necrophysics: "The Structure of the Necrocosmos" | |
Letters to Dead Authors, #14: Jane E. "I have had a disappointment." | |
15 The Final Dispatch: "Do you hear it too? That low, cool, reasonable voice..." | p. 389 |
The Stenographer's Story: "The alarm, though we did not recognize it for what it was..." | |
Readings: from "A Visitor's Observations." On the Difficulty of My Task | |
Letters to Dead Authors, #15: Jane. "At first my Theatrical Spectacle bid fair to be another disappointment..." | |
16 The Final Dispatch: "I flew like a phoenix out of the fire, and like a phoenix I was reborn." | p. 427 |
The Stenographer's Story: "The water went down, leaving the grass all slicked with mud." | |
Readings: from "A Visitor's Observations." A Private Conversation | |
Letters to Dead Authors, #16: Bartleby. "The story may have already reached you..." | |
17 The Final Dispatch: "The inspector set his hat on the spindly legged occasional table..." | p. 449 |
The Stenographer's Story: "Reader, she was dead." | |
Editor's Afterword | p. 481 |
Appendix A Last Will and Testament | p. 485 |
Appendix B Instructions for Saying a Sentence | p. 489 |
Appendix C Ectoplasmoglyphs#1-40 | p. 493 |