“Summertime, summertime, sum-sum- summer time.”

It’s summer time!  As a lover of haunted house literature and other spooky things, there is nothing like a stroll down a wooded trail in the dusk of an evening.   A moon is up there in the sky; its light finding me through the hovering tree branches with leaves of red, yellow, orange and brown.  At the end of the trail is a spooky old house. Jack-o’-lanterns  decorate the porch. Candlelight flickers through their ominous, triangular eyes.

Wait a minute, I’m describing an autumn evening in October, aren’t I?  What happened to this summertime stuff?

Truth be told, summer is my favorite season. But fret not autumnal lovers, fall is a very close second. Just because the summer solstice has staked its claim, it doesn’t mean I have to “give up the ghost”, does it?  Of course not. Haunted houses can be just as welcoming in the warm months (provided there’s air conditioning. Bring out the coolant. Or should I say “Boolant?”)

I know I have written about summer haunted houses somewhere in this blog.  I might not have outlined them all in one place as I did here with winter:

A Season of Snow: Five Winter-Themed Haunted House Novels I Have Reviewed

Or maybe I did?  I’m old now; I forget things and fail at searching efforts ( I can’t even find glasses on my head now a days)

I know I reviewed Michael Mcdowell’s “The Elementals”.  Haunted houses on the beach beside an ocean – can’t get much more summery than that!  Then there’s Michael Fowler’s “Nyctophobia” that takes place in a sun-drenched village in  Spain.  I would be remiss if I didn’t mention Dan Simmons “Summer of Night”.  Preteens, summer break, bike riding, a haunted school. 

Just to make sure the concept of summer ghost stories exists, I typed into Google exactly that – “summer ghosts stories”.  The first entry was a near literal return of a title bearing that exact  phrase – Ghost Summer: Stories by Tananarive Due.  I needed to look no further!  A collection of summer ghosts stories – and by a talented, award winning author to top off the ice cream cone. Ohhhh boy!  I was suddenly hot with sunlit excitement.  What a great find to begin a summer!

Tananarive Due is a “leading voice in Black speculative fiction”  (www.tananarivedue.com/bio-contact) I read one item from her bibliography –” Good House” It was a pleasant and enriching experience so I was more than delighted to take another journey to places of her creation and meet such interesting characters born of her mind.  This time, I found myself in Gracetown, FL meeting a literal African-American family, as the mother is from Ghana.  Three of the stories in the book take place in Gracetown.  The book consists of several stories and the breakdown is as follows: (thanks to the Goodreads profile of Magdalena aka A Bookaholic Swede for this information.)

This review concerns itself only with Ghost Summer.  It is the story I jumped to first since, after all, it does contain  two of the three key words of my search. In addition, all the rest are short stories. Ghost Summer is a novella (or at least a long novelette.)  Like a thick burger right off the patio grill, I needed something hardy to quell my appetite.  I’ll get to the rest. Hopefully the summer of 2025 is destined to be long with plenty of time for reading breaks. Now, I might not review them all. I might not review any of the others. Remember kids, what is the theme of these reviews?  

Answer: Ghosts?  * insert a wrong answer buzz here *

No, silly, it’s haunted houses, which sometimes don’t even feature ghosts.  Ghost Summer does have a haunted house.  The nature of its haunting has to do with the topographical terrain and things pertaining to the land that once was. I’m not yet sure if the other stories feature such charming abodes.

Twelve-year-old Davie and his little sister are vacationing with their father one summer at the house of his parents in Gracetown.  It seems this house and its corresponding land is the only place he can actively engage in his favorite pastime – ghost hunting. Legends say Gracetown is haunted, but only children are able to see ghosts.  These would be summer ghosts.  In this story, it’s not autumnal air or the chill of winter that ushers in the spirits.  It’s those magical summer eves that churn out the hauntings. 

The grandparents think all this is interesting but fictional. With a video camera and voice recorder, he has had fun with this on previous visits, but with limited results.  That changes with this visit, the very visit the Due writes about.  What are the coincidences that little Davie and his little sister participate in ghost hunting sessions that are too productive for their own good and at the very same time the author decides to tell readers a ghost story! 

For most of the story, bro and sis don’t have far to travel when it comes to chasing ghosts.  Ghost Hunting Central Station is right there in the living room! I remember sleepovers as a kid. Often we would camp out in a living room or basement with sleeping bags.  With flashlights in hand and ears attuned to nighttime sounds, it was fun to try and scare ourselves. This story brings me back to those days.  

However, the kids in this story encounter things in their campouts that go way beyond the “hee hee hee’s” elicited by members of my peer group. While we giggled, these kids scream in agony and terror.  All we felt on our floor was soft carpeting. Davie and his sister feel rising water that drenches their legs, all  while the adults can neither feel nor see such water.   Where the house stands now there used to be a swamp. Does this bit of history have something to do with the phantom water?  Hmm.

Other things to look for: a late night phantom dog prowling the hallways,  sniffing loudly underneath bedroom doors, disembodied screams from the surrounding land, and three mysterious boys at a campfire deep within the woods. 

There are other things at play in this story as well. There are tense family dynamics. There is the stuff of history, which always provides clues to a modern day haunting. It’s a history of land disputes between black and white landowners, racism and lasting strife. Of bad blood. Of children that go missing.

Tananarive Due is an expert at merging realistic historical fiction with ghost stories.  I look forward to reading all the stories in this book