Haunted Ecologies

"A startlingly bright collection of sparse and spooky ecological horror stories" -Library Journal

In these fifteen stories of ecological horror and dark fantasy, Farrenkopf delves into the depths of environmental decay and cursed ecosystems, searching ancient forests for elder gods and swimming the oceans with nameless things that live in the deep.

In "Mother's Wolves" an academic searches for her disappeared mother under the guise of a gray wolf rehabilitation study in the backwoods of Maine. In "We've Been in Enough Places to Know" and "Waterlogged," an underemployed property manager on Cape Cod traverses the crumbling halls of a seaside luxury condominium as something aquatic sings to him from the flooded basement. "To Tend a Grove" is the story of an eccentric millionaire's desire to rewild a golf course in the name of an ancient forest deity and the landscaper trapped in his verdant machinations. In "Translations for a Dead Sea" a down on her luck graphic designer retreats to her deceased father's bayside cabin in order to translate a long-lost poem that will either save the world from environmental collapse or speed up the apocalypse. In "The Tap, Tap, Tap of a Beak" a heartbroken ornithologist must make a pilgrimage to the mountain of bones that is the final resting place for endangered species, but a shady bone collector has other plans for the deceased woodpecker she carries with her.

In these stories, three published here for the first time, we encounter ethical werewolf rearing, murderous tree cults, Weird insectile evolutions, seaside folk horror, corrupt environmental tourism, gothic forest wanderings, eternal plastic pollution, sea-bound cosmic horror, hostile swamp creatures, and the ever creeping threat of climate change. Crack the spine. Step into the trees. Wade into the water. You will always be welcome in these haunted ecologies.

"Haunted Ecologies is a collection written in a classic and melancholic voice, filled with a blend of cli-fi and academia that follows enduring families, illuminating collapsing economics and ecosystems, presenting readers with nature metaphors that symbolize the change, turbulence, and turmoil in human lives. At the core theme of these interconnected short stories is the criticism of corporate corruption, wasting landscapes that offer daunting and prophetic futures, continuing memories, things lost and changed through translation, yet it also offers hope, even with the looming end of the world." -Ai Jiang, Bram Stoker and Nebula award-winning author of Linghun