Read Me and Other Ghost Stories

Book excerpt: It is 1974, and Cyrus Barnaby is a sophomore in college. He is also an orphan, having survived a horrific automobile accident fourteen years previously, an accident that took both his parents’ lives. Now Cyrus is an art student, a painting major at a large upstate university. He paints Dark Angels and gothic, symbolist landscapes.He also draws the cadavers in the Medical College’s dissection rooms, and what appear (to one professor at least) to be messages from the dead, written in blood vessel patterns in harvested brain cauls. Cyrus lives with other students in a large Victorian rooming house they call “Our House”. Although Our House looks, sounds, and acts like it is haunted, it isn’t. Cyrus is. READ ME, a novella, is a mystery story and a ghost story combined, and fits hand-in-glove with nine other ghost stories in this collection, including two new stories, “The Retirement” and “The Wrinkle”, published here for the first time.