Red Rabbit Ghost

by Jen Julian

Genres: Literary Fiction; Horror; Gothic

Synopsis

A cynical young outcast confronts his small town’s dark secrets in this atmospheric and haunting debut horror novel from brilliant new voice Jen Julian.
 
The town of Blacknot is not what it appears, and a place deep in the woods known only as The Night House is calling... 

Jesse Calloway hadn’t planned to return to his repressive, backwoods hometown of Blacknot, North Carolina, after only one year away at college, but an anonymous messenger has lured him home. Eighteen years ago, his mother died under unexplained circumstances. Every story he has heard is incomplete. Now, the messenger claims to have the answers. But Jesse will have to hunt for them.

Alice Catherine, the daughter of a local pork manufacturer, obsesses over Jesse in turn. To her, he is a key player in unearthing the dark family history she’s convinced her father is concealing. Alice knows Jesse must find the answers himself, with the hope that once he does, he’ll help her change both their futures. 

But Jesse’s path to Alice isn’t a straight line, and his questions are stirring up issues with locals, including his much older and well-armed ex-boyfriend, Harlan. When an old fling of Jesse’s goes missing and Alice’s plans start to unravel, it’s clear there’s more at stake than either of them could imagine. On a collision course littered with psychotropic fungi, time-warping magic, and far too many alligators, Jesse and Alice will need to determine how far they are willing to go for the truth, and whether they can trust each other enough to get there…

Release date: July 22, 2025

Publisher: Orbit

Print pages: 336

Sample

Jesse keeps his dead mother’s things in an old Tarbarrel tin. Pork jerky smell, black pepper and molasses, contained alongside photographs. His mother’s senior yearbook picture—her sharp, toothy grin. A Polaroid of her and Aunt Nancy toilet-papering the Confederate Memorial in downtown Blacknot. Nancy was seventeen then, his mother nine, both dressed in bell sleeves and fringe like it was still the 60s, though the Polaroid was taken by Jesse’s grandmother in 1982. On the back, an inscription: Nancy Jane & Constance Louise, getting in trouble.

Also inside the tin: twelve postcards addressed to Nancy while she was in graduate school, messages in his mother’s affected teenage voice—If you find a man in the Queen City, bring him home so that we might sacrifice him to the swamp gods and ensure the harvest.

Also: one bracelet of black wooden beads, which he guesses his mother must have worn.

Also: a series of articles from the paper about how they found her, dead, on the banks of the Miskwa River eighteen summers ago, and a small notebook of inscrutable thoughts, facts, and fantasies (Jesse couldn’t remember his mother, so he resorted to inventing details), which he wrote when he was a kid. River highest since 1980—average water temp 71°—she had black hair, pretty face, archy eyebrows—5 foot 1—shoe size 6 1/2, bad at singing—loved Wizard of Oz, X-Files, will-o’-the-wisp, animals—spoke French and Spanish—laughed at weird stuff like ghosts—smelled like cinnamon, fixed eggs better than Nancy, came home from work wearing costumes, played chess—

And so on.

There are many things the tin does not include. According to Nancy, Connie burned a lot of keepsakes and photos in the years leading up to the final breakdown that killed her, including pictures of her and Jesse together. That is his least favorite detail about her, aside from being dead.

Remarkably, he didn’t take the tin with him to college. When he packed last August, he decided to leave it right there on the upper shelf of his closet, its time-honored home. Now, after driving back the four hours from Greensboro, he finds that Nancy has used his monthslong absence as an excuse to pack up his bedroom to turn it into an office/meditation studio. All his posters and books and old school projects are stuffed away in boxes, the walls now hung with calming beach photographs, the closet clean of his baggy high school clothes and red Miskwa High sweatshirts.

And the tin, which is not where he left it.

“Where’d you put it?” he asks Nancy, trying not to panic.

His aunt stands in the doorway, looking sheepish. “I mean.” She gestures to the boxes. “I put away a lot of shit, hon. It’s probably here.”

“Probably?”

“I did throw some things out. Your old running shoes were biohazards. What did the tin look like?”

“Like a tin,” he says. “It looked like a tin. Red. A red tin. It had the Tarbarrel logo on it. It had—all her stuff was in there.”

“Her stuff?” Nancy says.

Jesse dives into the boxes. Some are open, some already taped shut. His aunt knows what he’s talking about, of course, but in the face of his alarm, she stands calm. Or at least pretends to.

“I’m sure it’s here somewhere.”

On principle alone, he doesn’t like that she’s done this, just crunched down and packed away his entire childhood like a whole lot of junk. Trophies for cross-country crammed in with mix CDs, the complete films of Bogart and Bacall. In one box, he finds the many amusing pulp fiction book covers he hunted down in flea markets all over the county, then, digging deeper, a glass hand pipe containing the charred residue of some backwater ditch weed. He bristles at the thought of Nancy finding it. Sure, they used to sing along to Peter Tosh’s Legalize It on car trips, but that doesn’t mean he wants her to have a firsthand view of his indiscretions.

But then, maybe the invasiveness was the point. Maybe her whole meditation studio plan was just an excuse to go through his stuff, to try to understand him one last time, unravel his secrets, account for his high school misery.

“Oh, stop being so frantic,” she says. “I’ll help you.”

“Don’t!” he says. “Please, don’t touch anything else. I’ll find it myself.”

“But you know I wouldn’t have thrown that out.”

“You just said maybe you did.”

She laughs. Her expression is becoming strained.

“But I didn’t trash anything important, sweetheart. Do you really think I’d just throw out—that?”

“Connie’s things,” he says. “My mother’s things.”

There’s no official moratorium on mentioning his mother’s name, though he realizes it’s been a long time since it was uttered aloud in this house. Nancy steps back, no longer smiling. Her face flushes with indignation.

After a minute, she says, “You know, you’ve caught me off guard, Jesse, just being here. You insisted you were staying out in Greensboro for the summer. Since November, that’s been your plan, right? Get a job, get an apartment. What happened?”

He can’t even tell if she’s happy to see him. Sure, when he first got in, she rushed out to the driveway to meet him, and when Dick, his red 1998 hatchback, let out its usual tricky sputter, she laughed and said, “Now, there’s a sweet sound.” All the neighbors must’ve heard it, too. Must’ve thought, Oh, that’s Jesse Calloway. Antsy Nancy’s boy. He’s back from college, finally. Because he didn’t come back for Thanksgiving, Christmas, or Easter. Nancy, who taught film and public speaking at the community college in Kneesville, had all the same breaks he did, so each time she’d drive out to see him, and they’d stay with Minerva, her old roommate from grad school, a silver-haired lesbian. And during every visit, Nancy praised the “culture” of the city (i.e., Greensboro) in comparison to the hick trashfire of Miskwa County, and then she drank too much wine and said she would be happy enough to see Jesse survive his freshman year without alcohol poisoning or gonorrhea, which he guessed was meant to take the pressure off or something. But in all that, there was never any talk of Jesse returning home. Nancy took him at his word.

“The plan,” he says to her, “changed.”

“It changed,” she says. “What changed? You were adamant about not coming back here.”

He rips up packing tape in snaky strips, one box after another.

“What changed?” she asks again.

He finds a plastic bin of photos: Jesse and Nancy at the carnivorous plant garden in Wilmington, another one of him and his grandfather at the Fort Fisher Aquarium, then a few with his former high school friends in their ninth-grade Halloween costumes, grins with retainer wires.

“I wanted to see friends,” he says.

“Which friends?” asks Nancy.

“‘Which friends?’ Why does that matter?”

“Because. Some of your friends have a history of getting you in trouble.”

He laughs. “Well, there you go. You got me. I drove four hours to get lit at some redneck barn party. Nothing like the scene in metropolitan Blacknot. Endless ragers. Orgies day and night.”

Nancy’s flush deepens.

“You had a plan,” she says firmly. “You changed your mind so fast, that’s all I’m saying.”

“For all you know, I’ve been thinking about it for weeks. And anyway, that’s got nothing to do with you culling out my shit without asking.”

“Oh, Jesse, stop it. Just stop. I didn’t—do you seriously think I’d do that on purpose, throw out those things, my sister’s things…?”

She trails off, her voice breaking. Tears fog up her glasses.

Little fucker, says a voice in Jesse’s head. First night home, and you have lied to Nancy and made her cry. Fine work.

“I didn’t say you’d do it on purpose,” he says, trying to be nicer. “It’s fine. It’s got to be here somewhere.”

“I mean,” she says tearfully, “you didn’t even take it with you. How was I supposed to know?”

In hindsight, yes, maybe the tin would’ve been safer if he’d brought it with him to college. But he never missed it there. Until a month ago, he was hardly thinking about Connie Calloway at all. Back at school, he was an actual adult, savvy and queer and experienced. He got props for liking David Lynch and owning a discontinued car. It’s 2015 and the 90s are cool again. Everything comes back around. Everything reincarnates.

That’s what changing your life is like, he assumes: a reincarnation.

Nancy lifts her glasses, squeezes her fingers against her eyes. “I didn’t throw it out, I didn’t,” she keeps saying. “At least, I don’t think I did.”

And he keeps saying, “It’s okay, it’s okay, I’m sure you didn’t,” though really, he just wants to find the damn thing so they can stop talking about it and she can stop crying.

Then, finally, hiding under a pile of Dashiell Hammett novels, there it is. The Tarbarrel mascot—a rosy-cheeked cartoon pig—beams goofily at him from the tin’s candy-red lid. He takes a breath.

“It’s there?” Nancy asks.

“It’s here.”

“Good.” She leaves the room, swiping at her tears and muttering, “Came all the way back here to fucking worry me.”

Sometimes, Nancy takes Jesse’s bad decision-making personally, and that is not his fault.

What did she say back in August when she took his shoulders in the campus courtyard? She was crying then, too, their clothes damp with sweat from carrying his stuff upstairs in an elevator-less dorm. She hugged him like he belonged to her, a compact little yin-yang, light and dark. Nancy is honey haired and pink faced, and Jesse inherited his mother’s wiry dark curls and brown eyes and sandy-brown skin. But they shared a cringey optimism there, in that courtyard.

“I knew you’d get out of there,” she said. “You are going to kick the shit out of this place. You’re smart. You bounce back. You always have.” Something like that. He remembers looking around at everyone else squirming in the face of similar talks from parents, grandparents, siblings. Everyone is tough. Everyone is the most genius genius.

“I’m just lucky,” he told Nancy.

“You’re not just lucky,” she said. “You’ll show them. You’re resilient.”

Then the fearsome Minerva swung back around in her SUV, driving without patience (she and her ex-wife had already seen their two children off to college), and she loaded up Nancy and the empty dolly and the bungee cords, and then, with a kiss and a blink, his aunt disappeared into the shaky summer heat.

Jesse was relieved to see her go. He carried his last box up to his room, a care package Nancy assembled: rolls of quarters, double-ply toilet paper, condoms (I know you can get these at the health center, she wrote in a mortifying note, but still). He met his roommate, a kid from Cary who introduced himself with a strong handshake, as if they were making a business deal: “Alex Khan. Poli-sci.”

“Jesse Calloway,” Jesse said. “Undeclared.”

“You on Wipixx?”

Wipixx was a social media app Jesse had never heard of, so he didn’t understand the question. At the time, he assumed Alex could discern immediately that he was a backwoods clown from a trashfire county.

“I’m sorry, man,” he said. “Did you just ask me if I’m on whippets?”

Reincarnation indeed.

Jesse reclaims his room. He takes down Nancy’s tranquil photos. Goodbye, sand dunes and softly waving seagrass. He tapes up all his pulp book covers in their place. There are at least forty of them, an impressive collection. However, when he steps back to admire them, he’s disheartened to see that they don’t look as cool or eclectic as he remembers. They look like a mess.

As he rearranges them, trying in vain to make them more aesthetically pleasing, Nancy sticks her head in the doorway.

“Did you even eat dinner?” she asks sharply. “You’re like a rail.”

He looks at her, startled. “I had something on the road.”

“Well, if you get hungry, you know, there’s a chess pie in the fridge. That’s still your favorite, right?”

Jesse feels suddenly ashamed of himself.

Later, when he goes to the kitchen, he finds the pie in the fridge: a pristine golden disc of butter and sugar. He’s not hungry, but he takes the pie out and stands in the kitchen doorway with it, fork in hand.

Nancy is grading finals in the den. The local news plays on mute. The windows are open to the night air of late spring, filling the room with an eggy smell. Nancy notices him standing there, sets aside her papers, and holds out an arm. He comes to sit by her.

“Sorry,” he says.

“Same,” she says. “I shouldn’t have gone through your stuff without asking.”

On the news, a young teacher leads a camera crew around his old elementary school. The hallway is lined with scribbly drawings of animals. Jesse experiences a wave of nostalgia. He pokes the chess pie with his fork.

“I know you can’t help it,” he says, “but you don’t need to worry. I won’t go anywhere near Pinewood. I promise.”

“Hmm,” Nancy says. “Thing is, sweetheart, it’s Blacknot.” She pronounces it the way the old locals do, like Black-nut. “If you’re here, you’re near everything.”

Jesse shrugs and looks down at the pie in his lap. He begins to eat it, so sweet it feels like it’s burning his tongue.

“You’re not going to cut a piece?” says Nancy. “You’re just going to eat it like that, like a monster?”

He licks the fork. “Uh-huh.”

She digs in herself, and they sit like that for a while, trading the fork back and forth until there’s a huge hole in the pie, as if an alien burst out of it. Jesse stares at the hole. Already, his stomach is telling him this was a mistake.

“Of course,” Nancy says, “I’m happy you’re here. Stay as long as you need.”

“Thank you. I know.”

“But you should know you won’t find a job. Merle hired out your spot at the diner.”

“I won’t be here long enough to get a job. A couple days, tops.”

She reaches out and brushes the hair off his forehead. “This new haircut… I don’t know about this haircut. It’s a little hipster-y.”

He bats her hand away. “No, it isn’t.”

“What do you think they’ll say about you when you’re waltzing around downtown Blacknot looking like this?”

“They’ll say, ‘That kid has his shit together.’ I mean, come on, I cleaned off the nail polish. What’s the issue?”

She squeezes his cheek. “I just want you to be careful.”

“I will, I will. Don’t fuss.”

He can see in her face that she doubts him; not that he’s lying, but that he’s making a promise he can’t keep. This is often the soul of her doubt, and the soul of his deceit. He believes wholeheartedly any promise he makes to anyone, every time.

He goes to bed early that night. The drive wore him out, he says. By three AM, he’s wide awake, listening to Nancy’s snores on the other side of the house and staring once again at the collage of book covers on his wall. They’re almost disturbing to him now; why is that? He lights a candle. His room is dark and hot. Most of these he didn’t even find himself, actually. The best ones—Alligator-Women from the Swamp Planet, which features the tagline “They’re here… and they’re horny!” and Attack of the Mutant Mushrooms, in which the monsters resemble dildos—those were gifts from Harlan. Thrifting is one of few gay activities a closeted man can enjoy in this county.

If Jesse wanted to, he could find other pieces of Harlan all around the room. A pair of jeans, pierced in the crotch by a spring in Harlan’s couch. A Union army coat button, which Harlan’s uncle found at the battlefield over in Kinston. But only Jesse would know the significance of these things; Nancy wouldn’t be able to pick them out.

God help him if she could.

But he’s not here for this. He doesn’t need this collection. He’s not a fucking kid anymore. His aunt’s impulse to cull, he feels it, too—though in a different, more volatile way. One by one, he tears the book covers away and takes them down the hall to the bathroom. There, he begins to burn them in the sink. The Alligator-Women curl up and turn black; the Mutant Mushrooms shrivel. The fire flares up unexpectedly and nearly catches the hand towel, and he is forced to open the bathroom window and let the smoke out into the night—

Whoosh. A flood of swamp stench hits him hard in the face. Low tide and hog farm. Confederate jasmine. Stale hot air. The assault seems personal, like this place has been waiting for him. Like it sees him. He never wanted to come back here. This stinking, suffocating place.

A rising wave of sugar burns the back of his throat. He leans over the toilet, and it comes up fast. A full-body retching. An exorcism.

That’s a bad sign. A terrible idea all around, this trip. But then he returns to his room, drained and shaky, and he sees his phone lit up on the bedside table.

A Wipixx message from Cat:

Welcome home

You want still pictures of your mother?

His heart hammers. This. This is what he’s here for.

Yes

Please

Tomorrow come town to bridge 9am

Tell no one

On Sunday, in church, Alice stands next to her stepmother, whose impressive lyric soprano rings in her ear like clover flowers. In all of Alice’s eighteen years on this earth, this may be the only thing she has ever found impressive about Bobbie Swink.

Would you be free from the burden of sin? There’s power in the blood, power in the blood. Would you o’er evil a victory win? There’s wonderful power in the blood.

The congregation is especially sleepy this week, which lets Bobbie’s voice rise to the rafters. Alice looks over her shoulder at a row of youth group kids who have been prodded to church by their parents, shadow-eyed faces dripping with hangover sweat. There was a party last night somewhere in town.

There is power, power, wonder-working power—in the precious blood of the Lamb.

Two verses later, Bobbie pokes Alice’s arm. She takes a break between “sin stains are lost” and “life-giving flow” to hiss through her teeth—“Sing!”—but Alice shakes her hand away and stares straight ahead at the pipe organ and the strident bouquet of lilies on the altar. Bobbie wants Alice to take part in something, to blend in. Which Bobbie herself would like to do. Pastor Moseley once asked her why she didn’t sing in the choir, and Bobbie, with an earnest modesty that made Alice cringe, insisted she couldn’t carry a tune to save her life. “I would die of embarrassment,” she said.

Eventually, Alice feels the gaze of her father, who’s standing as an usher in the side aisle. She looks at him dead-on. Compared to the other patriarchs, Euel is scruffy in his wrinkled linen dress shirt, mustache untamed, hair loose and floppy on his forehead. He lowers his chin, raising his two salt-and-pepper eyebrows as if he knows exactly what’s unfolding in her brain, as if he is asking her outright: This is the hill you’re gonna die on?

Alice sucks in a breath, and as the congregation approaches the last refrain, she belts out the words, flat and heavy as a falling brick—“IN THE PRECIOUS BLOOD OF THE LAMB.”

Bobbie grips her arm, digs her nails in.

“Beautiful, y’all,” says Pastor Moseley. “Couldn’t’ve sung it better myself. Praise be to God.”

The congregation replies in dreary unison: “Praise be to God.”

They sit. Alice looks at the indentations of Bobbie’s nails on her arm, then at Euel. She sees his cryptic smile, the slow shake of his head. Eyes burn into her back; she can feel them. But when she turns to look, most of the congregation appears not to have noticed her outburst. In fact, there is only one pair of eyes staring from the far back corner of the sanctuary where the Taylor family sits, Bill and Val and their pretty sixteen-year-old daughter, Morgan. The parents exhibit the stiff, bourgeois dryness typical of Alice’s neighbors, but Morgan looks like many of the other youth group kids: slouched, sweaty, likely recovering from the Dixie bacchanal that’s still in her bloodstream. She’s glaring at Alice, mouth slightly open, an expression that hovers somewhere between puzzlement and scorn.

Alice turns away. For all she knows, Morgan is still drunk, agonized by the wail of the organ. Alice has been told she shouldn’t drink at all because of the medications she’s been taking, but even so, she knows if she ever went to a high school party—she would not; no one would invite her; no one would have the opportunity to—if such a thing ever happened, she would find it deeply unproductive. Without a doubt, an ordinary kind of rebellion.

She stays quiet until the end of the service, when the congregation parades out onto downtown Main Street, all quaint and sunny and lined with skinny, wire-bound oaks, new sidewalks filled with glittery mica. Pastor Moseley stands in the narthex, shaking hands. When Alice comes through the line, he bows his head to her.

“Mighty strong voice today, Alice Catherine,” he says.

“Thank you,” she says flatly. “I was moved.”

Pastor Moseley laughs. Behind them, Alice can hear Bobbie thrumming with embarrassment.

“Nothing wrong with that,” he says. “Always best to let the Spirit dictate your volume.”

On the sidewalk, Bobbie whispers in her ear, “Why do you needle me so?”

“You told me to sing,” Alice says.

“Oh, heavens, Alice. Be serious.” She cranes her neck in search of Euel, but he’s already gotten caught up in a conversation with Councilman Bale, his wife, Ouida, and chatty, doll-faced Mrs. Moseley. Bobbie watches the group nervously, gripping and un-gripping her fingers.

“I told him he couldn’t go and chat forever like he usually does,” she says. “You’ve got your appointment at one thirty.”

“There’s plenty of time,” Alice says. But Bobbie is already trying to slide her way into Euel’s conversation, laughing at someone’s joke, tapping at Euel’s arm. Alice stays where she is, lest she feel compelled to needle Bobbie more.

That’s when Morgan Taylor pops out of nowhere.

“Hey, girl!” she chirps, leaning close into Alice’s periphery. “Hi.”

Alice steps back.

“Oh. Sorry. Didn’t mean to scare you.”

The girl is giving her a very odd, strained smile. In the glare of the sun, she seems even more wilted, eyes raccooned, pit stains spreading on her seersucker dress. She wipes her arm across her forehead.

“It’s hot. You don’t have a tissue or anything, do you? There’s sweat in my eyes.”

“I don’t.” Alice looks around. Where did the parents go? “Sorry.”

Morgan fans herself with the church bulletin. “You’re lucky. You look like you don’t sweat at all.”

“I guess.”

“All graceful. All tall and stuff. How tall are you?”

Alice looks down at Morgan’s sweaty ash-blond head. She is tall, it’s true. But she has never been graceful. Before Euel took her out of grade school, the kids had called her Frankenberry because she walked with a forward lurch and hunched her shoulders. Spooky Alice with her strange, sallow complexion, and her huge eyes, so dark they look black, and her hair, kinked and coarse in a way that always stressed Bobbie—Hair with personality, she used to say. Her face, she’s been told, is without personality, as blank as a glass of water.

No one would call Alice graceful unless they were flattering her. And now, going from what Alice knows about Morgan Taylor—an average, affluent, Southern American teen—and what she assumes Morgan Taylor has heard about her, she is right to suspect an ulterior motive to this conversation.

“Well, never mind,” Morgan says. “Hey—you know you’re only a couple houses down from me, right?”

“Yes. I know.”

“Remember when you used to come over to our house to play with my sister and me? Lauren had a game where we all pretended we found a portal to this other world? And Lauren became a sorceress and I became a magic horse?”

Alice looks toward her father, chatting now with Pastor Moseley, who has slipped quite naturally into the conversation. They look like they’re making plans.

“I don’t know why I was thinking about that lately,” says Morgan. “How’ve you been?”

“Sedated,” says Alice.

Morgan’s first response is to laugh, but then she seems to remember that two summers ago Alice was spending four months as an inpatient at Croatan Psychiatric Hospital. A silence passes. When Morgan speaks again, her voice is awkward and apologetic.

“It’s—it’s just like the song, you know. ‘Twenty twenty twenty-four hours to go-oh…’”

“I think I should head on,” Alice says, pointing nowhere.

“Oh. Sure, right. Catch up soon, maybe?”

Alice lurches her way over to Euel.

Her father extends his arm, drawing her in between him and Bobbie. “Alice Catherine,” he says. “If we invite these rowdy folks over to the house tomorrow evening, will you play for them? I’ve been telling them how you’re killing Debussy and you need a chance to show off.” He pulls Alice deeper into the circle, letting the Bales and the Moseleys have a good look at her. “She’s incredible, friends. She’ll send you to a new plane of existence.”

Alice would like to not be in this circle. She’s starting to think she would rather take her chances with Morgan.

“I’m not any good with Debussy yet,” she says.

“Like hell you’re not any good. You’re a demon on that harp. One thing, though—” Euel holds up his finger to the group. “They only get a performance if they behave.”

“If who behaves?” says Pastor Moseley. “In front of my own church, you tell me to behave?”

“Just don’t give him any rum,” says Mrs. Moseley.

“And I’ll drink whatever rum you don’t give him,” says Ouida Bale.

Their swell of laughter shakes Alice’s brain. Over Ouida’s shoulder, she can still see Morgan standing there on the sidewalk, looking at her. Then she slowly wanders off, and Alice wonders if she dodged that conversation too quickly. What was that about? What did that girl want? Girls like Morgan never had any interest in Alice, just as Alice had no interest in them.

So much has happened between now and those school days when Alice used to play with other kids, before her isolated homeschooling era. She barely remembers Morgan or her sister or their games. Recently, she overheard a conversation between Bobbie and Mrs. Taylor about how Morgan has “come out of her shell” in the past couple years, as if introverts were invertebrates. What they really mean is that Morgan is a girl who has figured out the rules regarding her volume: Don’t be a drip, but don’t be a loudmouth either.

Alice feels her stepmother beside her, an anxious, coiling spring. . .