Haunted House on the Prairie: A Review of Trespassing Time
by June Pulliam
08/02/2005
Baldwin, Barbara J., Jerri Garreston, Linda Maul and Sheri L. McGathy. Trespassing Time: Ghost Stories from the Prairie. Manhattan, KS: Ravenstone Press, 2005. 239 p.
I keep being nicely surprised by the offerings of small presses, and Trespassing Time is one of those pleasant encounters. This collection of ghost stories by four Kansas authors is unusual for a number of reasons. First is its setting, the American Prairie, a part of the United States that is relatively ignored by popular culture (the Western genre being a notable exception). This geographical location is particularly ignored by the horror genre, as stories about ghosts and vampires are more frequently located in Puritan New England and the South, with the later also a breeding ground for misbegotten and incestuous white people who become serial killers with bad grammar and even worse teeth. The prairie, and the Midwest really, don’t seem very ghostly on the surface, all revenants having been chased away by the non-belief of sensible and hardworking middle class Americans who speak standard English. Trespassing Time, however, brings this area of the country to life through representing it as haunted.
Many of the stories have a particularly regional flavor. “Lost in the Fog” captures the loneliness and danger of the 19th century frontier when a young wife is taken further west by her husband, who purchases cheaply a homestead thought by locals to be haunted. Not believing in what he thinks is nothing but local superstition, the husband makes the mistake of leaving his pregnant bride alone for a night to make a necessary journey for supplies into the nearest town. The story that gives the collection its title, “Trespassing Time,” presents a sort of Brigadoon on the Prairie and asks something I have wondered about for quite a while: why is the United States more often haunted by ghosts of European- and African-Americans than it is by the ghosts of its original inhabitants? Here an elderly man wishes to glimpse once more an ancient Native civilization that is only open to our world one night each half century or so. And “Whisper on the Wind” and “Dreams of the Dead” find ghostliness in how aviation and hydroelectric power transformed the landscape.
The collection is also unusual in the range of ghost stories, from revenants who mean no harm to humans, to spirits bent on getting back what was theirs, to vengeful shades. Some, such as “Christmas at the Gates of Hell” and “Maxie,” present ghosts as presences that comfort the living but aren’t particularly frightening. While others such “Forgotten, But Not Gone” and “Halloween at the Gates of Hell” are more chilling tales of ghosts who are either angry because their final resting place has been violated or else urge humans to commit potentially self-destructive acts. The placement of stories within the collection is also effective as it begins with one of those tales of the ghost as a benign presence, introducing slightly more frightening revenants as the book progresses, which has the effect of putting the reader in the position to feel comfortable with the spirits bound within these pages, only to have that trust somewhat shaken towards the end. Thus the ghost is completely restored to its ambiguous position within the imagination as a simultaneously serendipitous and frightening signifier of that which was lost but not so easily forgotten.
Trespassing Time has the strengths of a good collection of fiction loosely organized around a theme in that the stories aren't all of one piece, but include a wide variety of pieces that fit into the rubric. Here you'll find stories set in various times and places and all with very different horrific effects. In short, there's something here for everybody (at least, everybody who likes ghost stories), so like a good buffet, if one piece isn't exactly to your liking, you can move on and fairly quickly find something to catch your interest. Horror fans and ghost story aficionados who aren’t searching for out and out gore will enjoy this collection, as will anyone interested in fiction about this particular region.