"Five Ghost Stories" by Dennis Callaci

Five Ghost Stories is a collection of five meditations on isolation and absence, each with an abstract connection to the ghost towns that were quickly built in all of our hollowed-out cities over 2020. These stories drive through these new spaces in first gear, flash lighting, searching. Survivors carry those lost within them, in their rib cage, in their heart. Here are five ghost stories, the first one before you and the other four memorized by heart and waiting in their chambers.

Chapbook trailer for Five Ghost Stories by Dennis Callaci. Artwork and video by Dennis Callaci.

Dennis Callaci reads a selection from Five Ghost Stories.

"... these ghost stories are different.
Ranging in point of view from the stance of a very young protagonist to a very old one, these stories tell tiny but complex miniature epics of encounters, sightings, construction projects, defense manoeuvers, and – of course – disease. We travel from supermarkets, to living rooms, to embattled township perimeters and laboratories, to highways, to the street outside a strip joint. All in the space of about 45 pages. It’s quite a ride. But the writing is always lyrical, often self-deprecating, and alternatingly fierce and tender."

from Stephanie Barbé Hammer
January 3, 2021

"Dennis Callaci’s Five Ghost Stories is a book that I think could only have been written in quarantine. In five very short stories, Callaci explores the way that so many people’s interior worlds, or at least mine, have changed ... Fiction has the ability to let us know what we are not alone in the world, and that our pains and joys are shared. Callaci’s book did this for me."

from Tears in the Fence, review by John Brantingham
January 18, 2021

Dennis Callaci

Dennis Callaci (photo by Catherine Guffey)
Dennis Callaci was born in Corona, California and has bounced around Southern California his entire life. He runs the record label Shrimper, noted for bringing forth the earliest recordings from Amps For Christ, Woods, Franklin Bruno, Lou Barlow's Sentridoh, The Mountain Goats,and a few hundred other releases over the course of the last thirty years. He is also in the band Refrigerator who have released twelve records over those three decades as well as solo records by Callaci. His first book, 100 Cassettes, was published by Pelekinesis in 2019.