Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine - September/October 2024

I dette nummeret

In EQMM’s September/October 2024 issue, we usher in the spooky season with monsters real and metaphorical. In “Knock-Knock” by Sarah Hilary, a woodworking apprentice in Japan tries to escape an ancient ghost, and in a tale with Gothic atmosphere a man who travels to a remote island to find out what happened to an old classmate discovers that the line between life and death isn’t straightforward (see “Gannets and Ghouls” by Sue Parman”). In Robert L. Fish Memorial Award winner Kate Hohl’s “Rosabelle,” a scrappy WWII-era wannabe actress assists her grifter (or is she?) psychic landlady at a séance, and in Josh Pachter’s “Wind Phone,” there is communication with the dead—but also a more concrete task at hand.
Then again, “Not All Hauntings Are by Ghosts,” as Robin Kirman shows us in her twisty tale about deep psychology—and that’s also the case in “The Phantom of the Concourse Plaza” by Jerome Charyn (from the Black Mask department), which focuses on a young boy who lives (and works) in a Bronx hotel with mobsters, politicians, and Yankee players. Another kid, in “Head Start” by Kai Lovelace (from the Department of First Stories), is roped into a strange Halloween prank by his very odd neighbors.
Characters in other stories are stalked by very real demons, such as those of anti-Semitism (“The Jews on Elm Street” by Anna Stolley Persky, from the Department of First Stories), racism (“The Polar Bear Padre” by John F. Dobbyn, another Yukon tale in verse), and bare ambition at the cost of anything else (“The Gaslight Sonata” by Richard Helms, a case for Boatright and Crapster set at the symphony).