Ghost Technology From the Sun : PostScripts 12

I’ve decided to post a short story of mine for free online. This was originally published in PostScripts issue 12, and is called Ghost Technology From the Sun. It was a very well received short story (was an Honorable Mention in the 2008 Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror and had positive reviews). It is a story about a girl, in a 1800′s cult, trying to survive.  Good for fans of Steampunk, weird horror and surrealism. This is shared using a Creative Commons license.

[Read for Free Online]
[Originally published in Post Scripts issue 12]

Master told us that the earth was hollow, and that we lived on the inside of it, clinging to the top of the crust. Below us was another world, a world inside the world, a glowing bright sun of a place. What master called the summerlands. That is where the dead live, he said. That is how we can talk to them, he said. They send us signals across the air, and the mediums pick them up and drink them in.

From the Review at the Fix Online:
In “Ghost Technology From The Sun,” if she were luckier, Marybeth might be one of the children skating in that Old Master poem, as the adults await the miraculous birth. Instead, when we first see her, she is wishing for a blessing of her own, like the ones her mother and many of the other women of God’s Foot carry in their swelling bellies. She is an innocent magician, a conduit for terrifying words and images from the hungry dead that the Master seeks to propitiate, offering them worship and dark tithes. Her cornhusk dolls rustle with voices, and like Donnie Darko, she is visited by a disturbing rabbit with ambivalent desires and access to gateways which wishes to take her away from her home. Jessup uses beautiful (but not overwrought) language to build a febrile, surreal fantasy world as symbol-laden as a fairy tale and as sensual as a waking childhood nightmare, whose narrator sounds like a little girl rather than a mystic or a philosopher. Its farm setting and moonshiner’s brew of folkloric and Lovecraftian elements is only too appropriate for the harvest season, when holidays like Halloween glut our hunger for horror, and the Day of the Dead and Samhain bring departed spirits to the homes and hearts of the living.
[read the review]