Read @ Joe’s

Title: Summer in the House of the Departed (2025) Author: Josh Rountree Publisher: Psychopomp Book jacket: Summer in the House of the Departed is a golden-edged tale of the bond between a boy, his eccentric grandmother, and her ghost-filled old home. Joe says: This is a tender, eerie ghost story that feels as true as a memory.

Author Josh Rountree crafts a haunting, coming-of-age novella about ghosts, death, and West Texas in Summer in the House of the Departed. This is a beautiful read where the ghosts are melancholy, sickness is as everyday as layers of dust, and the wonder of magic can be transcendent.

“Summer in the House of the Departed lingers like a half-remembered dream.”

Bookended by two summers, 1981 and 2025, Brady starts and (perhaps) ends his life in his eccentric grandmother’s sprawling haunted house. Granny, her body wasting away under the stresses of cancer, searches for answers to the unexplained — the lost Roanoke Colony, a developed photo that constantly changes, the restless apparitions that drift through her halls — while Brady seeks meaning in his own young life where his adolescent companion is a dead girl named Shirley. Decades later, Brady returns to that same house, carrying the weight of a lifetime, to look for the truths Granny could never quite grasp.

Throughout it all, Rountree treats the reader to his unique narrative voice. He balances the wide-eyed awe of Brady as a boy with the cigarette-burnt gaze of a man looking backward.  Rountree’s prose is sympathetic and sad yet laced with a dusty sort of beauty, making this short story appear all the shorter. He folds in the crackle of Texas thunderstorms, the ache of family ties, and the claustrophobic haze of cigarette smoke until the story feels more inhaled than read.

Summer in the House of the Departed is fantasy-tinged horror that lingers like a half-remembered dream. This is tender, eerie, and it feels true — like the best ghost stories always do. Rountree’s ghosts don’t just haunt the house — they haunt you, long after the book has been put down. Summer in the House of the Departed proves some houses never stop keeping their secrets.

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Thank you, Josh, for personally sending your latest over to me. As a fan, I truly appreciate the connection.