Josh Rountree is joining us today to talk about his novel, Summer in the House of the Departed. Here’s the publisher’s description:
This is a sometime place, not an all the time place…
Summer 1981: Brady’s grandmother vanishes-along with an entire West Texas town. There’s no explanation, except those that don’t hold any logic. Brady doesn’t worry too much about that, having spent his childhood listening to his grandmother’s stories and playing with the pencil-sketched ghosts in her old Victorian: the young Shirley, the injured cowboy Glen, and others.
People slipping away into another world is fantasy. It’s impossible.
Summer 2025: Brady returns to his grandmother’s house, hoping to understand what happened, and to find out exactly where his grandmother went. Brady holds a hope close to his heart: That he can duplicate whatever magic his grandmother conjured, to follow in her footsteps as his own ghost-tattered life comes to its close.
I was there. I know what I saw…
What’s Josh’s favorite bit?
Summer in the House of the Departed isn’t like most haunted house books.
The ghost stories in these pages are real.
My grandmother was a ghost hunter in the early eighties. Well known in our part of the state as someone who was keenly interested in your supernatural stories. She collected tales of ghosts and all manner of strangeness, conducted her own investigations, and was slowly gathering these stories, photographs, and interviews together in hopes of writing a book.
It would be a treasure trove of West Texas folklore. But she passed away before she ever had the chance to write it.
Most of the stuff she collected now lives in a box in my house. For years, I would dig through it all, wondering if I might finish her book. Or wondering what else I might do with it.
There was a story about a family who would communicate with their guardian spirit, using a talking board made from a windshield. There was the tale of the Rock House, a supposedly haunted place deep in the wilds of West Texas with creepy stories dating back to the Old West days. And there was the changing photo, which I remember vividly from my youth, with an image that changes every so often. Something in the image will disappear. Something new will appear. And every copy behaves the exact same way.
When I was a kid, she’d tell me these stories and others. She’d show me her creepy photographs. She’d let me listen to cassettes with ghosts wailing and screaming and jumping on beds.
Pretty sure this is a big part of why I’m a horror writer, yeah?
I’ve lived with these stories my whole life, and eventually I figured out what to do with them. I would write a story about my grandmother. A story about my eight-year-old self. Entirely a work of fiction, but fueled by these memories.
Summer in the House of the Departed tells of a boy, spending one last summer with this grandmother, while she tries to sort out the mysteries of death. She is dying, and he knows this will be their last summer together. She is fond of telling him stories, and she does so at various points in the book.
But of course, these aren’t just stories I made up. These are real stories, the same stories my grandmother told me. And that’s My Favorite Bit. Writing these scenes was a chance to sit beside her again, and listen to her voice as she talked about La Llorona, haunted houses, ghosts of the prairie, and all sorts of cool and creepy folklore.
All the stories the grandmother in this book tells, I gathered from my own grandmother’s typewritten pages of notes. From radio interviews she did. From newspaper articles about her supernatural exploits.
I gathered them from my memories.
And now I’m telling them to you.
LINKS:
BIO:
Josh Rountree is a Texas novelist and short story writer. His novel, The Legend of Charlie Fish, was released by Tachyon Publications in 2023 to wide acclaim, making the Locus Recommended Reading List, and being named one of Los Angeles Public Library’s best books of the year. A followup novel, The Unkillable Frank Lightning, will be published this summer.
More than seventy of his short stories have been published in a variety of venues, including The Deadlands, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Bourbon Penn, Realms of Fantasy, PseudoPod, Weird Horror, and The Year’s Best Dark Fantasy & Horror. Several collections of his short fiction have been published, including Fantastic Americana, and most recently, Death Aesthetic, featuring tales of death and transformation.
Rountree lives in Austin with his lovely wife of many years, and a pair of half-feral dogs who demand his obedience.