Haunting Hands

From smartphones to tablets, mobile media is increasingly playing a central role in the representation, sharing, and experience of events public and private, formal and informal. Drawing on cross-cultural fieldwork, 'Haunting Hands' considers the role mobile media practices and rituals provide as fundamental insights into contemporary notions of life, death and loss.

An actress stars in her own off-screen mystery in this Golden Age whodunit from the award-winning Jamaican novelist, poet, and historian. Though originally a medical student specializing in chemistry, twenty-five-year-old Margot Anstruther decides to try her luck as an actress and gets cast in her first role for the Superfilm Company. With the studio’s boorish director taking a personal interest in her, Margot finds herself caught in the middle of two men: her boss and her increasingly jealous suitor, Gene Varley. One night, alone in her midtown Manhattan apartment after a party, Margot is shocked to find a hand reaching out from under her bed. Though Gene and the police find no sign of an intruder, Margot refuses to believe in a supernatural cause. She puts her scientific mind to work delving into her apartment’s strange past—a recent tenants’ disappearance—and walking a fine line between the complicated passions of friends and rivals . . .

A dark family secret prompts a ghost to seek revenge in this spooky novel in the spirit of Mary Downing Hahn. The only life 12-year-old Emily has ever known is the cold, unloved existence of being an orphan. But everything changes when the Thorntons, a young couple from London, adopt Emily, whisking her away to a new life at their grand estate. At first, life at Blackthorn Manor is wonderful. But as Emily explores the grounds and rooms, she stumbles upon a mysterious girl named Kat, who appears to be similar in age, and the two become fast friends. That's when things take a turn for the worse. Kat seems to know a curious amount about the estate, and strange things happen whenever she's around. In one case, Emily narrowly avoids getting toppled by a bookcase in the library; in another, the fire erupts in the fireplace, nearly burning Emily's hands. It's almost as if someone -- or something -- wants Emily dead. Emily must find out what happened to the Thorntons and, more important, how Kat is connected to these strange goings-on at Blackthorn Manor before it's too late!

This Shirley Jackson Award–winning novel is “a true surreal phantasmagoria . . . [a] gothic supernatural” horror story set in the decadent world of British rock (Chelsea Quinn Yarbro). When the young members of a British acid-folk band are compelled by their manager to record their unique music, they hole up at Wylding Hall, an ancient country house with dark secrets. There they create the album that will make their reputation, but at a terrifying cost: Julian Blake, the group’s lead singer, disappears within the mansion and is never seen or heard from again. Now, years later, the surviving musicians, along with their friends and lovers—including a psychic, a photographer, and the band’s manager—meet with a young documentary filmmaker to tell their own versions of what happened that summer. But whose story is true? And what really happened to Julian Blake?

Wyattsville, Oregon –The Most Haunted Place In America. For fourteen year old Cotton Tennison, the Wyattsville ghosts are not the horrors he fears. The living are far more scary. As the town outcast, Cotton suffers the abuse of his drunk father and the torment of the local bullies - a group known as the Red Meat Boys. His only refuge is The Wyatt House, an abandoned house at the end of his street, a house filled with ghosts and specters that the town would prefer didn’t exist. When several teenagers are brutally murdered, the town council decides to turn the Wyatt House over to a family of ghost hunters with questionable intentions. Here begins Cotton’s struggle to find a way to save the house, his ghostly friends, and the entire town before an evil force destroys them all. Intentional Haunting is a Teen horror novel that mixes the tender macabre of Neil Gaiman’s The Graveyard Book, the suspense of Stephen King’s The Shining, and the dark humor of Tim Burton’s Beetlejuice. It is the personal story of a young man surviving the abuse of a town that has abandoned him, a young man that will be faced with a choice when the fate of Wyattsville rests in his hands. Will he be able to look beyond his resentment to save the town that has caused him such pain or will he walk away, just as the town walked away from him?

Shelby Rivers only has a few months of secondary school left when, along with a group of friends, she narrowly escapes with her life after a terrifying car accident, thanks to the kindness of a complete stranger. As she recovers, Shelby realizes her friends are no friends at all. Years later, she feels compelled to carry out a meticulously crafted plan to exact her revenge, in an attempt to wipe away the painful memories. When Shelby returns to her hometown after a considerable absence, she finds that although the landscape has changed, her feelings have not. After gathering information on her so-called friends with the sole purpose of ruining their lives, Shelby is quickly sobered when she realizes that she too has been the focus of someone else’s attentions, and this person has pieced together her catalogue of deceit. Once Shelby puts her vengeful plan into motion, there is no one left to catch her fall—except, once again, a complete stranger. In this engaging tale, deception envelops a dysfunctional quest for absolution as a woman faces the demons from her past once and for all.

WINNER, The Center for Fiction First Novel Prize Brooklyn Public Library Book Prize Longlist A Best Book of 2023 - NPR, Electric Literature, Largehearted Boy, Black Girl Nerds, Le Noir Auteur "An absolute triumph." —Michael Schaub, NPR "Astonishing." —Kiese Laymon, MacArthur Fellow and author of Long Division "What a beautiful, haunting and hued narrative of American living. I’m in love with this story." —Jacqueline Woodson, MacArthur Fellow and author of Another Brooklyn A poignant debut for readers of Jesmyn Ward and Jamel Brinkley, We Are a Haunting follows three generations of a working class family and their inherited ghosts: a story of hope and transformation. In 1980’s Brooklyn, Key is enchanted with her world, glowing with her dreams. A charming and tender doula serving the Black women of her East New York neighborhood, she lives, like her mother, among the departed and learns to speak to and for them. Her untimely death leaves behind her mother Audrey, who is on the verge of losing the public housing apartment they once shared. Colly, Key’s grieving son, soon learns that he too has inherited this sacred gift and begins to slip into the liminal space between the living and the dead on his journey to self-realization. In the present, an expulsion from school forces Colly across town where, feeling increasingly detached and disenchanted with the condition of his community, he begins to realize that he must, ultimately, be accountable to the place he is from. After college, having forged an understanding of friendship, kinship, community, and how to foster love in places where it seems impossible, Colly returns to East New York to work toward addressing structural neglect and the crumbling blocks of New York City public housing he was born to; discovering a collective path forward from the wreckages of the past. A supernatural family saga, a searing social critique, and a lyrical and potent account of displaced lives, We Are a Haunting unravels the threads connecting the past, present, and future, and depicts the palpable, breathing essence of the neglected corridors of a pulsing city with pathos and poise.

Psychedelics, neuroscience, and historical biography come together when a journalist finds a lost photograph of Aldous Huxley and uncovers a hidden side of the celebrated author of Brave New World and The Doors of Perception. Allene Symons had no inkling that Aldous Huxley was once a friend of her father's until the summer of 2001 when she discovered a box of her dad's old photographs. For years in the 1940s and '50s, her father had meticulously photographed human hands in the hope of developing a science of predicting human aptitudes and even mental illness. In the box, along with all the other hand images, was one with the name of Aldous Huxley on the back. How was it possible for two such unlikely people to cross paths--her aircraft-engineer father and the famous author? This question sparked a journalist's quest to understand what clearly seemed to be a little-known interest of Aldous Huxley. Through interviews, road trips, and family documents, the author reconstructs a time peaking in mid-1950s Los Angeles when Huxley experimented with psychedelic substances, ran afoul of gatekeepers, and advocated responsible use of such hallucinogens to treat mental illness as well as to achieve states of mind called mystical. Because the author's father had studied hundreds of hands, including those of schizophrenics, he was invited into Huxley's research and discussion circle. This intriguing narrative about the early psychedelic era throws new light on one of the 20th-century's foremost intellectuals, showing that his experiments in consciousness presaged pivotal scientific research underway today.