
Every House is Haunted by Ian Rogers
Ian Rogers must love Shirley Jackson, for his stories are often like hers, gentle on the surface, but with a knife thrust from below. In Every House is Haunted, his debut collection, Rogers writes about haunted houses, yes, but more often about haunted people, or shadows of people. Rogers sometimes has trouble finding appropriate endings, but his stories are always engaging.
The collection is divided into sections named for rooms in a house: the vestibule, the library, the attic, the den, and the cellar. There is not often a relationship between the tale and the room in which one finds it, however. "Aces," the first story in the collection, is an example; it hasn’t got a darned thing to do with a vestibule. It is about Soelle, a girl who indirectly kills a classmate and has no guilt or sorrow over the act. She just wants her confiscated tarot cards returned to her. She talks about ... Read More