Mapping the Interior: A Tor.com Original

by Stephen Graham Jones

Overview

"Brilliant." —The New York Times

Mapping the Interior is a horrifying, inward-looking novella from Stephen Graham Jones that Paul Tremblay calls "emotionally raw, disturbing, creepy, and brilliant."

Blackfeet author Stephen Graham Jones brings readers a spine-tingling Native American horror novella.

Walking through his own house at night, a fifteen-year-old thinks he sees another person stepping through a doorway. Instead of the people who could be there, his mother or his brother, the figure reminds him of his long-gone father, who died mysteriously before his family left the reservation. When he follows it he discovers his house is bigger and deeper than he knew.

The house is the kind of wrong place where you can lose yourself and find things you'd rather not have. Over the course of a few nights, the boy tries to map out his house in an effort that puts his little brother in the worst danger, and puts him in the position to save them . . . at terrible cost.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780765395108
Publisher:	Tom Doherty Associates
Publication date:	06/20/2017
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	112
Sales rank:	99,127
Product dimensions:	4.10(w) x 6.60(h) x 0.90(d)

About the Author

STEPHEN GRAHAM JONES was raised as pretty much the only Blackfeet in West Texas—except for his dad and grandma and aunts and uncles and cousins. He now lives in Boulder, Colorado with his wife, a couple kids, and too many old trucks. Between West Texas and now, he's published more than twenty books, including the novels The Fast Red Road, Ledfeather, and Mongrels, and the short story collections After the People Lights Have Gone Off, States of Grace, and The Ones that Got Away. Stephen teaches in the MFA programs at the University of Colorado Boulder and the University of California Riverside-Palm Desert.

Editorial Reviews

…[a] brilliant novella…By the end of Mapping the Interior Junior, an optimistic but not a stupid boy, has gone through something like the adult process of epistemological suspense: kicking the tires of that notion you're thinking of believing, then taking it for a spin before you seal the deal…Jones burdens his young hero with plenty of life-or-death decisions…And he drives the action with a heavy foot on the accelerator…

The New York Times Book Review - Terrence Rafferty

"Brilliant." —The New York Times

"Stephen Graham Jones's Mapping the Interior is a triumph. So emotionally raw, disturbing, creepy, and brilliant. You will not be unmoved. You will not be unaffected. It's a ghost story in the truest, darkest, most melancholy sense. Stephen knows we are haunted by our parents, our families, and our shared pasts as much as we are haunted by ourselves; haunted by who we were, who we become, and who we could've been." —Paul Tremblay, author of A Head Full of Ghosts and Disappearance at Devil's Rock

"Stephen Graham Jones’s chilling Mapping the Interior is part S.E. Hinton and part Shirley Jackson. It’s about being young and broke, and that moment when you first wonder who your parents really are. The answers are out there, but they will leave you haunted forever." —Richard Kadrey, author of the Sandman Slim series

"Mapping the Interior is Jones at his best." —PANK Magazine

"A chilling tale told from a less-heard perspective, Mapping the Interior is the type of horror story you keep on your shelf for regular hauntings." —Rue Morgue

"Mapping the Interior is thus a masterful critique of time, place, and memory in (post/de)colonial contexts that surfaces questions urgent for Native literature, horror fiction, and American history." —World Literature Today

"Wonderfully refreshing and not to be missed." —Publishers Weekly

From the Publisher

04/10/2017
Jones’s neat little horror novella balances an energetic narrative with larger explorations of the inescapable burdens of family ties. A young boy, Junior, who’s dealing with his brother’s deteriorating mental condition and constant seizures, begins to see visions of his dead father in his labyrinthine house. Junior wrestles with his Native American heritage, calling into question his family’s failures and his own sense of justice as his father’s sinister purpose is revealed to the family. Jones weaves these meditations through the entirety of the novella, and his writing, at once electric and elegiac, keeps the reader firmly in a state of suspense. The central idea of the novella could have been expanded and elaborated on, but part of the charm of this piece is its brevity, and Jones still imbues it with emotional depth. The immediacy of Jones’s fiction is wonderfully refreshing and not to be missed. (June)

Publishers Weekly