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Older Than Ghosts
In the middle of the night, Daniel and his mother flee their burning home in Mississippi for a bus bound to Chicago. There they find brief peace and safety at his grandparents’ house. But Daniel’s mother cannot resist the siren call of a tumultuous relationship and soon abandons Daniel to go back to her abusive partner.
At thirteen, Daniel believes he’s almost a man. So it’s his responsibility to rescue his mother. When an ancient spirit attached to his family becomes interested in his quest, their partnership will both test and temper the love between family members and the lengths they’re willing to go to save one another.
At thirteen, Daniel believes he’s almost a man. So it’s his responsibility to rescue his mother. When an ancient spirit attached to his family becomes interested in his quest, their partnership will both test and temper the love between family members and the lengths they’re willing to go to save one another.
128 pages, Paperback
Published April 21, 2026
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Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews
August 1, 2026
A horror novella exploring the impact of domestic violence on children and the intersection of race, class, gender and violence.
Older Than Ghosts follows a thirteen-year-old Black child trying to protect his mother from the stepfather that abuses them both. Aiding him is a spirit with a complex relationship to morality with ties to his ancestors. It's a slow-burn, character driven horror story that is unsettling and richly layered. The writing in the early part feels a little clunky at times, but it smooths out and some of the wording choices eventually make sense. We're really living in the head of the main character who is navigating adult issues as a child just coming of age, believing himself to be more of a man than he is. I received a copy of this book for review, all opinions are my own.
Older Than Ghosts follows a thirteen-year-old Black child trying to protect his mother from the stepfather that abuses them both. Aiding him is a spirit with a complex relationship to morality with ties to his ancestors. It's a slow-burn, character driven horror story that is unsettling and richly layered. The writing in the early part feels a little clunky at times, but it smooths out and some of the wording choices eventually make sense. We're really living in the head of the main character who is navigating adult issues as a child just coming of age, believing himself to be more of a man than he is. I received a copy of this book for review, all opinions are my own.
June 27, 2026
⭐⭐⭐⭐
Thank you to Brandon White for the gifted copy and for allowing me to read and review this novella.
After fleeing a tragic fire with his mother, thirteen year old Daniel finally finds a sense of safety with his grandparents in Chicago. But when his mother returns to an abusive relationship, Daniel becomes determined to save her. Along the way, an ancient spirit tied to his family's past enters his life, leading him on a journey filled with horror, heart, and the unbreakable bonds of family.
I thought this was such a unique story. Going in, I wasn't entirely sure what to expect, but I was hooked almost immediately. For a novella, this book packs so much into such a small number of pages. There was always something happening, and I never felt like the story slowed down or wasted a moment.
What really stood out to me was the blend of horror with family relationships. At its heart, this is a story about love, sacrifice, trauma, and the lengths we will go to for the people we care about. The supernatural elements added an eerie atmosphere, but they never took away from the emotional core of the story.
I also appreciated how much Brandon White was able to accomplish in novella form. The pacing kept me engaged from beginning to end, and I found myself completely invested in Daniel's journey. It takes talent to create a story that feels both emotionally satisfying and memorable in so few pages, and I think this book did exactly that.
**Would I recommend it?**
Absolutely! If you enjoy horror with heart, unique supernatural elements, emotional family stories, and novellas that make every page count, I definitely recommend picking this one up.
Thank you to Brandon White for the gifted copy and for allowing me to read and review this novella.
After fleeing a tragic fire with his mother, thirteen year old Daniel finally finds a sense of safety with his grandparents in Chicago. But when his mother returns to an abusive relationship, Daniel becomes determined to save her. Along the way, an ancient spirit tied to his family's past enters his life, leading him on a journey filled with horror, heart, and the unbreakable bonds of family.
I thought this was such a unique story. Going in, I wasn't entirely sure what to expect, but I was hooked almost immediately. For a novella, this book packs so much into such a small number of pages. There was always something happening, and I never felt like the story slowed down or wasted a moment.
What really stood out to me was the blend of horror with family relationships. At its heart, this is a story about love, sacrifice, trauma, and the lengths we will go to for the people we care about. The supernatural elements added an eerie atmosphere, but they never took away from the emotional core of the story.
I also appreciated how much Brandon White was able to accomplish in novella form. The pacing kept me engaged from beginning to end, and I found myself completely invested in Daniel's journey. It takes talent to create a story that feels both emotionally satisfying and memorable in so few pages, and I think this book did exactly that.
**Would I recommend it?**
Absolutely! If you enjoy horror with heart, unique supernatural elements, emotional family stories, and novellas that make every page count, I definitely recommend picking this one up.
August 21, 2026
I picked this up because I saw that it had supernatural elements and is by a black author, set now, near where I live but in a neighborhood I've never visited. The house on the cover looks like houses on my block.
I liked the descriptions of regular family life in Kankakee, and the way the family deals with the Thing, the Spirit they have, and how they support each other. I was rooting for the protagonist the whole way, and especially enjoyed the parts where he's on his quest, trying to figure out logistics of traveling alone as a kid doing something dangerous.
I felt like the ending could have been a little more dramatic, or cathartic, or exciting, but maybe I was missing the point. The good guys win, anyway. Sort of.
I liked the descriptions of regular family life in Kankakee, and the way the family deals with the Thing, the Spirit they have, and how they support each other. I was rooting for the protagonist the whole way, and especially enjoyed the parts where he's on his quest, trying to figure out logistics of traveling alone as a kid doing something dangerous.
I felt like the ending could have been a little more dramatic, or cathartic, or exciting, but maybe I was missing the point. The good guys win, anyway. Sort of.
April 24, 2026
Sweet Potato Pie and Pre-Colonial Metaphysics
BWAF Score: 6/10
TL;DR: A debut novella with ambition larger than the page can hold. Brandon White puts a Black Midwestern kitchen and a pre-colonial cosmology in the same sentence and trusts the strangeness to do the work. The prose is uneven, the exposition outpaces the plot, and the best scenes are reason enough to read it.
The book opens in the second person. A thirteen-year-old boy is pulling his mother’s body across a kitchen floor. There is blood on the tiles. There is an air conditioner rattling. There is a man asleep in the bedroom. The boy is going to set fires in the oven and the microwave, open the gas valves, and drag his mother across a clay-dirt road to the edge of a dead garden where the strawberries used to grow. The prose counts the objects in that house. Lysol. Bathroom tissue. Cans of food dropped off by the grandmother’s old church. The second person is doing the work of a recognition (a child in that kitchen, at the moment the fires catch, would have stopped being able to narrate his own life), not the work of stylistic flourish.
It is a short novella. The second person lasts a few pages. The rest is close third, moving with a boy named Daniel as he and his mother ride the Greyhound north out of Mississippi, land at his grandparents’ brick house twenty minutes south of Chicago, and begin the slow discovery that the man in the bedroom did not die in the fire.
Brandon White is interested in ancestry as a literal presence. The grandmother made a deal, decades ago, with something that calls itself family and will not submit to any other name. When Daniel returns to his grandparents’ basement and finds it speaking to him too, there is no shock reveal. The grandmother already knows. The grandfather already knows. The neighbors across the block, the Harveys, who bring sweet potato pies and a deck of cards, know enough to stop naming it out loud in front of their children. This is the book’s best instinct. The entity, which cannot be called god or devil without the grandfather softly correcting the word, speaks in fragments of a cosmology that predates the one Daniel has been taught. Meroitic. The Candaces. A Nubian archer named Amanis who fought Rome with fifty arrows and later walked west. Mansa Abu Bakr and his ships. The entity is not interested in the Bible. It keeps asking Daniel to find out what words his ancestors used before the ones he has.
This is a more interesting spiritual architecture than almost any horror novella will try. It is also a lot to carry in a book this thin.
White is a librettist as well as a fiction writer (he has worked for Houston Grand Opera), and the libretto instinct is audible: a small cast in compressed chambers, stories passed across a kitchen table, a grandmother’s voice carrying the score. The spades game in the third chapter, where Daniel’s grandparents and the Harvey family bid blind six while trying to explain to a thirteen-year-old that he has been written into a multigenerational bargain, is the best writing in the book. The Eve 100s in the ashtray. The empty bottles in the garbage can. The grandmother dealing spades while telling the story of Johnnie Parker, who killed a white man over dice in Clarksdale and was hunted down with the rest of his family, one cousin at a time. It is not scary in the conventional sense. It is something else. It is the recognition that a place does not stop being haunted because the house that was on it has burned down. (The grandmother’s word for this is that every plantation has ghosts. She means right now. She means today.)
The horror proper is nested inside that recognition. There are scenes of serious dread. A basement with a faceless thing in the corner of it, swirling and galactic, answering back in the boy’s own voice. A figure at the edge of a muddy grave, legs kicking, watching the silt fall. A cigarette flicked at a Greyhound from a passing car that does not go out in the rain because the rain was conjured. They do double duty as lessons in ancestry, and the prose cannot always hold both at once.
This is where the book shows the pressure of its ambition. The entity explains itself at length. The grandmother explains the entity at length. The grandfather adds footnotes. Daniel asks questions and gets answers in riddles, then in history, then in more riddles. The book is short. The exposition is not. In the middle stretch, the propulsion that was there on the first bus ride gives way to transmission, and some of the cleaner horror beats (the cigarette attack on the bus, in particular, which is strange and then sits there doing nothing) drift out of focus because there is too much being translated at once. The sentences themselves are uneven. A page that shimmers will be followed by a page where the syntax folds back on itself, or the third-person voice slides into the boy’s head at an angle that does not match what a thirteen-year-old would actually be thinking. “The universe did not acknowledge such a thing as honor. It did not exist.” Daniel is a child.
White holds an MFA from the University of Houston and has published short fiction in STORGY, The Brooklyner, and The Journal of Hip Hop Studies. Older Than Ghosts is his first book from Lanternfish Press. It reads like a debut. That is not always bad: the ambition is larger than the polish, and the ambition is why the book is worth reading. A second book will tell us whether the prose catches up to the instinct, or whether the instinct was always going to be this book’s real subject and the prose always going to be slightly behind it, waving from the other side of the road.
What it leaves behind, in any case, is the grandmother at the kitchen table, smoke rising off an ashtray she said she had quit, dealing the next hand to the company she has kept faith with. And the question she cannot quite bring herself to answer out loud: what her faith bought her, and what it still owes.
BWAF Score: 6/10
TL;DR: A debut novella with ambition larger than the page can hold. Brandon White puts a Black Midwestern kitchen and a pre-colonial cosmology in the same sentence and trusts the strangeness to do the work. The prose is uneven, the exposition outpaces the plot, and the best scenes are reason enough to read it.
The book opens in the second person. A thirteen-year-old boy is pulling his mother’s body across a kitchen floor. There is blood on the tiles. There is an air conditioner rattling. There is a man asleep in the bedroom. The boy is going to set fires in the oven and the microwave, open the gas valves, and drag his mother across a clay-dirt road to the edge of a dead garden where the strawberries used to grow. The prose counts the objects in that house. Lysol. Bathroom tissue. Cans of food dropped off by the grandmother’s old church. The second person is doing the work of a recognition (a child in that kitchen, at the moment the fires catch, would have stopped being able to narrate his own life), not the work of stylistic flourish.
It is a short novella. The second person lasts a few pages. The rest is close third, moving with a boy named Daniel as he and his mother ride the Greyhound north out of Mississippi, land at his grandparents’ brick house twenty minutes south of Chicago, and begin the slow discovery that the man in the bedroom did not die in the fire.
Brandon White is interested in ancestry as a literal presence. The grandmother made a deal, decades ago, with something that calls itself family and will not submit to any other name. When Daniel returns to his grandparents’ basement and finds it speaking to him too, there is no shock reveal. The grandmother already knows. The grandfather already knows. The neighbors across the block, the Harveys, who bring sweet potato pies and a deck of cards, know enough to stop naming it out loud in front of their children. This is the book’s best instinct. The entity, which cannot be called god or devil without the grandfather softly correcting the word, speaks in fragments of a cosmology that predates the one Daniel has been taught. Meroitic. The Candaces. A Nubian archer named Amanis who fought Rome with fifty arrows and later walked west. Mansa Abu Bakr and his ships. The entity is not interested in the Bible. It keeps asking Daniel to find out what words his ancestors used before the ones he has.
This is a more interesting spiritual architecture than almost any horror novella will try. It is also a lot to carry in a book this thin.
White is a librettist as well as a fiction writer (he has worked for Houston Grand Opera), and the libretto instinct is audible: a small cast in compressed chambers, stories passed across a kitchen table, a grandmother’s voice carrying the score. The spades game in the third chapter, where Daniel’s grandparents and the Harvey family bid blind six while trying to explain to a thirteen-year-old that he has been written into a multigenerational bargain, is the best writing in the book. The Eve 100s in the ashtray. The empty bottles in the garbage can. The grandmother dealing spades while telling the story of Johnnie Parker, who killed a white man over dice in Clarksdale and was hunted down with the rest of his family, one cousin at a time. It is not scary in the conventional sense. It is something else. It is the recognition that a place does not stop being haunted because the house that was on it has burned down. (The grandmother’s word for this is that every plantation has ghosts. She means right now. She means today.)
The horror proper is nested inside that recognition. There are scenes of serious dread. A basement with a faceless thing in the corner of it, swirling and galactic, answering back in the boy’s own voice. A figure at the edge of a muddy grave, legs kicking, watching the silt fall. A cigarette flicked at a Greyhound from a passing car that does not go out in the rain because the rain was conjured. They do double duty as lessons in ancestry, and the prose cannot always hold both at once.
This is where the book shows the pressure of its ambition. The entity explains itself at length. The grandmother explains the entity at length. The grandfather adds footnotes. Daniel asks questions and gets answers in riddles, then in history, then in more riddles. The book is short. The exposition is not. In the middle stretch, the propulsion that was there on the first bus ride gives way to transmission, and some of the cleaner horror beats (the cigarette attack on the bus, in particular, which is strange and then sits there doing nothing) drift out of focus because there is too much being translated at once. The sentences themselves are uneven. A page that shimmers will be followed by a page where the syntax folds back on itself, or the third-person voice slides into the boy’s head at an angle that does not match what a thirteen-year-old would actually be thinking. “The universe did not acknowledge such a thing as honor. It did not exist.” Daniel is a child.
White holds an MFA from the University of Houston and has published short fiction in STORGY, The Brooklyner, and The Journal of Hip Hop Studies. Older Than Ghosts is his first book from Lanternfish Press. It reads like a debut. That is not always bad: the ambition is larger than the polish, and the ambition is why the book is worth reading. A second book will tell us whether the prose catches up to the instinct, or whether the instinct was always going to be this book’s real subject and the prose always going to be slightly behind it, waving from the other side of the road.
What it leaves behind, in any case, is the grandmother at the kitchen table, smoke rising off an ashtray she said she had quit, dealing the next hand to the company she has kept faith with. And the question she cannot quite bring herself to answer out loud: what her faith bought her, and what it still owes.
September 12, 2026
Daniel is only 13, but has witnessed things no child should ever have to - domestic violence and unrest in his home. He refers to his step-father as The Beast, and the novella starts out in a first person murder attempt, which Daniel later learns has failed.
Daniel wants to finish the job, and to help him, he has an entity that has surrounded his family for generations and gives him a connection to his ancestors. His whole family is aware of this entity; it’s by no means a secret.
I almost DNF’d this one. The story only picked up towards the last 30% and even then, it didn’t do much to salvage the rest. I always stress that ratings and reviews are personal: what I rate two stars, someone might rate five stars, and this is a novella that you’d need to read to understand the complexity of it all.
The thing that pulled my rating down to two stars was the lack of closure at the end. There are some horror novels that just don’t need one, but this had a feeling of being incomplete.
I wanted to love this. I wanted to love this so much, but for such beautiful writing, it fell short in so many ways — which is a damn shame. But, it isn’t out of bad writing or bad plot, it’s actually the opposite. Brandon White created something complex and tried to squash it into 121 pages.
If this was longer, and the more complex parts of the plot were really taken into consideration, this could have blown anyone away. But what we’re left with is a (somewhat) confusing, complicated lore. Brandon had a lot to say, but not enough room to say it.
Daniel wants to finish the job, and to help him, he has an entity that has surrounded his family for generations and gives him a connection to his ancestors. His whole family is aware of this entity; it’s by no means a secret.
I almost DNF’d this one. The story only picked up towards the last 30% and even then, it didn’t do much to salvage the rest. I always stress that ratings and reviews are personal: what I rate two stars, someone might rate five stars, and this is a novella that you’d need to read to understand the complexity of it all.
The thing that pulled my rating down to two stars was the lack of closure at the end. There are some horror novels that just don’t need one, but this had a feeling of being incomplete.
I wanted to love this. I wanted to love this so much, but for such beautiful writing, it fell short in so many ways — which is a damn shame. But, it isn’t out of bad writing or bad plot, it’s actually the opposite. Brandon White created something complex and tried to squash it into 121 pages.
If this was longer, and the more complex parts of the plot were really taken into consideration, this could have blown anyone away. But what we’re left with is a (somewhat) confusing, complicated lore. Brandon had a lot to say, but not enough room to say it.
Review of advance copy received from Edelweiss+
This novella is really compelling in its characterization of Daniel, the protagonist, and his quest/mandate to seek justice on behalf of her mother. Playing with the idea of ancestral spirits that could be evil, White explores trauma over generations, and the reasons because choices that define a family. While the novella opens with Daniel and his mother escaping an abusive situation, when his mother leaves to return to her partner, Daniel is visited by a spirit-demon that gives him instructions to seek justice. It’s an entity familiar to his grandparents, both tangible in its presence but also beyond space and time. The ending was quick and a bit unresolved, but also as a novella, it did a lot with the space allotted
May 31, 2026
I will be thinking about this for a long time!
June 2, 2026
I was captivated by the juxtaposition of history and predictions. The entity in this book leaves you wanting to ask your own questions, and it grants a glimpse into generational beliefs/trauma.
August 31, 2026
Great, creepy little novella that I picked up at a local indie bookstore here in Houston!
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