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.