Josh Rountree is a busy writer! His novel, The Unkillable Frank Lightning, is barely out of the gate and now his new novella, Summer in the House of the Departed (Psychopomp), is open for preorders. I enjoyed Rountree’s other Texas-based stories, so I was happy to receive this ARC.
The first thing that struck me in this novella was the spirit of the place and time, taking me back to my childhood. I grew up in a desolate area that still bears the scars of the ecological disaster known as the Dust Bowl. Rountree’s portrayal of his characters’ language and cadence of speech rang true to my memories. Immersive details—a beaded cigarette case, clothing decorated with conchos—brought images of my mother, my grandmothers, my aunts. And the wind! Rountree acknowledges the wind perfectly in his description of the titular house: “…leaning ever so slightly eastward, a concession to a century of relentless wind.” Sounds much like my great grandmother’s farmstead.
Rountree’s expertise in crafting a convincing setting extends into character development. These folks are easy to love. Granny and eight-year-old Brady have a magical relationship. The ghosts that inhabit Granny’s house are endearing and touched with compelling mysteries. I wanted to reach through my screen and hug each of them.
The story is broken into two parts. The first, set in 1981, thrums with questions and tension. That tension is compounded with a jump forward, to 2025. I couldn’t pause my reading because I so badly wanted to witness these mysteries coming to fruition, to see these characters to find what they needed. I wasn’t disappointed, and I imagine other readers will love this story as much as I did.
Big thanks to Psychopomp for letting me have a sneak peek at this book, and to Josh for taking time to answer my questions.
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Art by inkshark, design by Christine M. Scott
Myna: Summer in the House of the Departed is a fantastic title! What’s the novella about? Who are your characters?
Josh: Thanks! Summer in the House of the Departed is about a young boy named Brady, spending the summer of 1981 with his grandmother in her old, haunted house. Granny is a supernatural researcher, and she writes books about a variety of weird and esoteric subjects. Her house is full of ghosts, and Brady has made friends with most of them. Granny is dying of cancer, and the first half of the book details her efforts to solve the mystery of the afterlife, and Brady’s coming of age as he learns more about his grandmother and her mysteries.
The second half of the book takes place in the summer of 2025, as Brady returns to Granny’s old house, with a much better understanding of who she was and the problems she was facing. Now Brady is dealing with his own mortality, and he hopes that rejoining the ghosts in Granny’s house will lead him to the answers he’s been searching for since he was a child.
Myna: How did this story come about?
Josh: While this is a work of fiction, Summer in the House of the Departed was inspired by memories of my own grandmother. She was a sort of supernatural researcher in the late seventies, early eighties. She collected ghost stories and other tales of the strange, and became known throughout West Texas as an authority on ghost tales. People would come to her with their photographs, their unsettling experiences, their offbeat questions, and their requests for help.
My grandmother would happily join people on their ghost hunts, or visit the sites of their hauntings, and she kept all her notes and recordings in hopes of writing a book someday. I recall her showing me spooky photos when I was a kid, and letting me listen to ghostly sounds emanating from one of her many cassette tapes.
She passed away when I was a teenager, and never got a chance to write her book. I wound up with a lot of her “ghost stuff.” Newspaper articles, photos, recordings, and some of her own writings. For a long time, I thought it would be fun to do a book of her collected ghost stories, but ultimately, I decided writing this novella about a boy and his grandmother was a project closer to my heart. A work of fiction, informed by real life.
Myna: What themes do you explore?
Josh: Grief and mortality make up the heart of this book, as the characters probe at the afterlife, looking for answers. That mystery drives them. In the end, there is no real answer for any of us, at least not one that we can share with the living.
Myna: When a reader finishes the last word in the book, what emotion will they be feeling?
Josh: Hopefully, it will be wonder. For all the pain and sadness in this book, I feel like there is an undercurrent of hope that will satisfy, even when some of our questions remain unanswered.
Myna: I love stories with a strong regional flavor. How does the Texas personality influence your writing? Do you find inspiration in the area’s history? The landscape? The music?
Josh: That Texas connection means everything to my writing. My family has been in Texas for generations, and this place is a core part of who I am, for better for worse. A lot of us struggle with where we’re from, and I’m no exception, but Texas, at its heart, is a wild and beautiful place.
In particular, this story is set in the Permian Basin, the part of West Texas where I grew up. The Old West is still close, out there. The memory of that time is always a ghostly presence. The Permian Basin is rich with oil and cotton and dust and wind, and they conspire to shape the landscape and the people. Granny and Brady live among these ghosts and their memories, and they embrace the harsh beauty of the land. So much of this book is built from the way I remember that place, when I was a child.
And, of course, I love Texas music of all sorts. Some of that music plays an integral part in the story.
Myna: If this novella had a theme song, what would it be?
Josh: For sure it would be the Willie Nelson version of “Blue Eyes Crying in the Rain.” Some of my earliest memories are of Willie’s music, and that’s the case with the young protagonist in this book too. Particularly fitting is the line “Someday when we meet up yonder, we’ll stroll hand in hand again.” That song has a haunting, elegiac vibe that I think fits this book perfectly. A lot of Willie’s music runs through the story, and I had it on repeat the whole time I was writing.
Myna: In the last two years, you’ve published two novels, a novella, a short story collection, and a variety of short stories. How do you stay motivated? (Are you exhausted?!)
Josh: There are just so many stories I want to tell! People often ask writers where they get their ideas, but ideas are the easy part. It’s narrowing down the best of them, figuring out how they want to be told, and carving out time to put the words on the page. I usually have to find small blocks of time here and there to write, so I’m a bit slower than I would like to be, but eventually I get the job done.
For years I wrote only short stories, and it’s still my favorite form. But lately my stories have been growing longer, and I’m trying to embrace that change.
My two novels are both set in a universe of Texas monster stories that I’ve been working on for a long time. The Unkillable Frank Lightning is a retelling of Frankenstein in the Old West, and The Legend of Charlie Fish features a Creature from the Black Lagoon type character navigating the terrible hurricane that hit Galveston, TX in 1900.
And my latest short story collection, Death Aesthetic, is filled with stories about death and grief and transformation. The vibe of that collection is very close to Summer in the House of the Departed for sure.
Myna: How would you describe your writing style, in general? Does that hold true for this book?
Josh: I’m a fairly slow and deliberate writer, and my hope is that results in a strong, readable style, that really sings at the sentence level. We are all a product of our influences, but I feel after so many years of writing, all of that has filtered through my brain and emerged as my own unique style.
I am very particular about the voice of any given project, and will often agonize over early sections to make sure it’s exactly what I want it to be. After that, the story begins to move a bit more quickly, and I can start bouncing the characters off one another. That’s where the fun really starts for me.
Myna: Do you have a pet, or other non-writing hobbies/activities? Show us a picture!
Josh: Yes, I have a peekapoo named June Carter Cash and a yorkie named Ember. They are majestic beasts, and we live under their mostly benevolent rule.
Myna: What’s next for you?
Josh: I’m finishing up a short novella that I can’t quite talk about yet, and I’m working on a big, bloody, fantasy novel. I’m also hoping to write more books in my Texas monster universe soon. On top of that, I have a few short stories that are bugging me, so I’ll work on those too. Hopefully these will all hit the mark and we’ll see them in the world at some point, but for now, it’s just fun to be writing!
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Josh Rountree is a Texas novelist and short story writer. His novel, The Legend of Charlie Fish, was released by Tachyon Publications in 2023 to wide acclaim, making the Locus Recommended Reading List, and being named one of Los Angeles Public Library’s best books of the year. A followup novel, The Unkillable Frank Lightning, will be published this summer.
More than seventy of his short stories have been published in a variety of venues, including The Deadlands, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Bourbon Penn, Realms of Fantasy, PseudoPod, Weird Horror, and The Year’s Best Dark Fantasy & Horror. Several collections of his short fiction have been published, including Fantastic Americana, and most recently, Death Aesthetic, featuring tales of death and transformation.
Rountree lives in Austin with his lovely wife of many years, and a pair of half-feral dogs who demand his obedience.
Find Josh on Bluesky.
Myna Chang 