Mapping the Interior

by Stephen Graham Jones

Overview

Notes From Your Bookseller

Short, sharp and layered with haunts, this is a deeply thematic and darkly satisfying horror story that lingers like the ghosts that walk its pages.

Stephen Graham Jones, the New York Times bestselling author of The Only Good Indians, brings readers on a spine-tingling journey through a young boy's haunted home.

"Brilliant."—The New York Times

Times have been tough for twelve-year-old Junior, his mom, and especially for his younger brother Dino. When his dad makes a surprise visit late one night, Junior is desperate to make him part of their family again. The only problem is Dad drowned eight years ago.

And bringing back the dead always comes at a cost…

Winner of the 2017 Bram Stoker Award for Long Fiction!

Also by Stephen Graham Jones:

Night of the Mannequins

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781250406026
Publisher:	Tor Publishing Group
Publication date:	04/29/2025
Pages:	112
Product dimensions:	5.00(w) x 7.80(h) x 0.40(d)

About the Author

Stephen Graham Jones is the New York Times bestselling author of The Only Good Indians. He has been an NEA fellowship recipient and a recipient of several awards including the Ray Bradbury Award from the Los Angeles Times, The Mark Twain American Voice in Literature Award, the Bram Stoker Award, the Shirley Jackson Award, the Locus Award, the Jesse Jones Award for Best Work of Fiction from the Texas Institute of Letters, the Independent Publishers Award for Multicultural Fiction, and the Alex Award from American Library Association. He is the Ivena Baldwin Professor of English at the University of Colorado Boulder.

Editorial Reviews

WINNER of the 2017 Bram Stoker Award for Superior Achievement in Long Fiction • Nominated for the World Fantasy Award for Best Novella!

"Brilliant."

—The New York Times

"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, New York Times bestselling author of A Head Full of Ghosts

"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 and co-author of The Dead Take the A Train

"Jones’s neat little horror novella balances an energetic narrative with larger explorations of the inescapable burdens of family ties...Wonderfully refreshing and not to be missed."

—Publishers Weekly

"A darkly meditative tale of innocence, family, and ghosts that only Stephen Graham Jones could tell."

—New York Journal of Books

"Jones explores the fraught and tangled landscape of memory in its various forms — dream and nightmare, presence and absence, specter and reality — through a narrative that merges dark fantasy and horror with a classic coming-of-age story."

—Los Angeles Review of Books

"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

From the Publisher

…[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