"Ghost Stories" by Jack Ross

When a book is titled Ghost Stories, that brings with it certain expectations on the part of a reader. New Zealand poet, editor, writer and teacher Jack Ross tries to break such expectations in his 2019 collection of this title. This is first evidenced by redefining terms on the rear cover blurb:

David Foster Wallace once wrote that "every love story is a ghost story." Not all of the stories in Jack Ross's new collection are about love, but certainly all of them concern ghosts--imaginary, real, or entirely absent. As it turns out there are even stranger things in the world from haunted hotel rooms in Beijing to drunken poetry readings on Auckland's North Shore.

The blurb by Tracey Slaughter also helps frame the reader:

There's no one in New Zealand literature exploring the dark ways of narrative with the alchemical touch of Jack Ross ...

These quotes, and Ross's own eccentric Introduction, "The Classic New Zealand Ghost Story," makes one realize that the ghost stories herein are by no means typical fare--and indeed, some are not ghost stories by most people's definition. Besides the Introduction, there are nine stories, followed by a section called "The Cross-Correspondences", comprised of seventy-two numbered paragraphs followed by a (sort-of) nonfiction addendum explication of some of the aspects found in the previous paragraphs. Much of the whole seems experimental in terms of narrative construction.

There is also a kind of hodge-podge in tracing of subjects within each story, for that seems to me the author's approach. A self-reflexive comment in the story "Catfish" seems particularly apt:  "It's just that most of my imaginative life is now conducted in the third person, in communication with the writers of books and the creators, for the most part, of bad TV." That statement reflects the contents of most of the stories, in which topics run from numerology to L. Frank Baum, old movies to Mayan eschatology, General Grant of the US Civil War on to sites to see in modern China, as well as covering aspects of Kipling--some of his stories, as well as his "mad" sister, Alice Fleming. 

The cover illustration (by Graham Fletcher) is quite nice, but the text on the rear cover is almost too small to read. The text inside the book suffers from the same smallness (punctuation is easy to miss). Ross and the same publisher has just published (in July 2024) a second volume titled Haunts.