The House on Dead Confederate Street, by Jim Ruland

As Lucille rambled on about our duties, we gradually came to understand that we would be spending our community service hours designing, decorating, and staffing a haunted house for Halloween.

Jul 11, 2023

I’ve known

for years. His book, Big Lonesome, is 18 years old (wait, that can’t be right?!) and I still think about some of those stories often, as I do his amazing haunted casino novel (tell me you don’t want to read a haunted casino novel!), Forest of Fortune. (He told me he was gonna send me his newest, Make It Stop, but he hasn’t (👀), so I can’t rave about that.) His essay, “Ode to Joy,” was one of the best things I published in 20 years of doing annual baseball issues with Hobart.

We went on a short reading tour through the Midwest earlier this summer and amidst talking about all the various projects we were both working on — novels, nonfiction projects, this very Substack! — he mentioned this haunted house story. Between knowing and being a fan of Jim’s writing, and the way he talked about this story when telling me about it, I knew I would love it. I begged him to send it to me and… I did love it! Excited to get to share it.

I met Tammi Mahoney in the Young Offenders Rehabilitation Program. She had straight blonde hair that fell to her shoulders, a horsey laugh, and a commitment to blue eye shadow. She seemed taller than she was and had the physique of a soccer player—flat-chested with voluptuous thighs. She hung out with the stoners at St. Aloysius, the Catholic high school we both attended.

We were in a large room attached to the courthouse when our names, along with those of several others, were read from a dot matrix printout, the strips of holey paper on either side still attached.

“I know you,” Tammi practically shouted as we followed a tired-looking woman into a conference room. “You’re Andrew!”

“Hi Tammi,” I said, squeezing out a smile.

Everyone knew Tammi Mahoney. She was pretty enough and popular enough and trouble enough that I was surprised she knew my name.

“First time?” she asked. When I nodded she leaned in and rubbed her shoulder against mine. “What are you in for?”

“Miss Mahoney,” said a woman wearing a name tag that read Lucille. “I can already tell we’re going to have problems.”

“Sorry,” Tammi said, but added “bite me” in a voice that only I could hear. I thought I might lose consciousness, that’s how smitten I was with Tammi Mahoney.

YORP serviced a network of community service projects throughout Northern Virginia. Tammi and I were assigned to a not-for-profit seasonal-entertainment center whose proceeds would benefit kids with cancer. As Lucille rambled on about our duties, we gradually came to understand that we would be spending our community service hours designing, decorating, and staffing a haunted house for Halloween.

“Cool!” Tammi exclaimed.

“Miss Mahoney,” Lucille said. “Please control yourself.”

We were on the verge of being booted out of St. Al’s, which was keeping a close eye on our progress at YORP. How we performed our community service would go a long way toward determining whether or not we had a future at the school.

Lucille explained that compared to roadside maintenance, pulling weeds in the community garden, or wrapping Christmas presents at the mall, we’d lucked out, but if we failed to take our duties seriously our community service would be revoked and we’d be sentenced with the harshest punishment the law would allow, up to and including jail time.

This got my attention. I didn’t know why the others were here but the judge had been lenient with my sentence and I knew it.

After we signed the required paperwork, Tammi brushed up against me again. “You ready to get weird?” she asked.

It was the last house on a street named after a dead confederate general, an old gray Victorian with a ramshackle porch and a dour-looking tower. It didn’t take much effort to imagine it as a haunted house.

Our team leader was a chain-smoking woman named Judy who worked for the county and gave off gym teacher vibes. She wore velour tracksuits and smoked each cigarette like it was her last.

Before the county bought it, Judy explained, the house had been sitting empty for years. It hadn’t been torn down because the house had some historical significance. This was Virginia. Everything had historical significance. It was in the air we breathed and in the dirt we walked on. When they broke ground to expand the Volvo dealership where my father worked, they discovered an old Civil War battlefield, the bones of dead Virginians rotting in the way of progress.

Tammi and I were both seniors at St. Al’s. Bobby and Carlos were friends from the public high school who’d been busted for stealing materials from a construction site they claimed was for a time machine they were building. Mark was a heavy metal obsessive who got narced out by his mom when she found a foot-long Tokemaster in his closet that he’d stolen from a head shop and swore he’d never used, which none of us believed for a second. Tammi called him Metal Mark and the name stuck. Devon, the youngest at thirteen years old, had gone for a joy ride in his stepfather’s car that ended when he plowed through the front of a grocery store. “Cry for help,” Tammi said. “He was wearing his seatbelt.”

I marveled at the things Tammi knew. She seemed like she already had one foot in the grown-up world while I was still heavily invested in arcade games and comic books, habits I paid for with money I earned delivering newspapers, a job I’d only recently quit.

“I got popped for cocaine,” Tammi told me as we toured the house, “but the bag was empty. Just residue.”

“That sucks,” I said, but I’d misunderstood the situation.

“Nah, I totally did it. School’s more fun on blow.”

My idea of excessive fun was drinking a liter of grocery store soda during a monster movie marathon.

I marveled at the things Tammi knew. She seemed like she already had one foot in the grown-up world while I was still heavily invested in arcade games and comic books.

“You’re not going to tell me what you did, are you?” Tammi asked.

“No,” I said with a smile that I hoped wasn’t creepy. I’d tried to burn down a church, but I wasn’t ready to share that yet. I was the weird kid at school and I didn’t want to be the weird kid in this crew who would become the best friends I ever had.

We spent the first week cleaning the house. Even though it was well established as a haunted house, the county neglected the property during the offseason in the mistaken belief the lack of upkeep contributed to its spooky vibe. Cleaning isn’t the right word for what we did. We excavated the place.

We removed mountains of beer cans and liquor bottles and red solo cups left behind by derelicts and revelers. We swept the floors and scrubbed the walls of graffiti, most of which were Greek letters. We bagged feces we hoped wasn’t human while trying not to disturb the cobwebs and dust, which suited the house somehow.

We thought we’d be done in a couple days, three tops, but the house was bigger on the inside than it looked from the outside. It had two sets of stairs that led to the second floor with an impossible number of bedrooms, bathrooms, and walk-in closets that were like rooms within rooms. It was easy to get turned around up there, especially in the dark. I took a wrong turn and found myself in a room without windows and started to panic. I quickly figured out where I was but the spike of fear stayed with me all afternoon.

On the third day the power came on and we saw how much more work we still needed to do, but we also began to see the possibilities. At the beginning of the second week, Tammi revealed her plan for the haunted house. She’d mapped out every room and had a scheme for funneling people through the house in a way that maximized opportunities for scaring them. Guests would arrive in the living room, go up the front stairs, make their way through a maze of bedrooms, proceed down the back stairs to the kitchen, and then go out the back door. “We’ll scare them right out of the house!” she said.

Some people are made to make art. Others are naturally gifted at music. Tammi was put on this planet to scare people. She came up with an idea to turn the kitchen into a mad scientist’s laboratory, which Bobby and Carlos were all over. Tammi explained the loud noises and flashing lights inside the lab would create a choke point at the bottom of the stairs, a place where people would hesitate to enter. Here, beneath the stairs, we’d erect a graveyard littered with leaves and cardboard tombstones where someone would lie in wait until enough people were huddled at the doorway, and while they were focused on the danger ahead we’d come at them from the side, forcing them to flee into the lab where scientists in blood-splattered lab coats were waiting with their diabolical instruments.

By the end of the planning session, we were all believers in Tammi’s genius. Not only were her ideas great but each one was suited to the person who’d implement it. Metal Mark was the enforcer, the guy who’d chase people down hallways with an axe. Devon, the smallest, would sneak up on guests and infiltrate groups, blending in until someone noticed him, his face all ghostly and white like a dead child.

Judy approved all of our plans and asked for a list of supplies we’d need.

“I’m on it,” Tammi said.

“What about me?” I asked.

“I’ve got something special for you,” she said with a wink.

I was rooting around in the basement when I saw the ghost. I needed some paint to cover up some graffiti and Judy told me to look downstairs. Carlos was already down there, fiddling with something in the corner.

“Hey Carlos,” I said, but he didn’t answer.

The paint was right where Judy said it would be, underneath the stairs. I cracked open a few cans with a screwdriver to see if it was still good. There were three cans of black paint and two white that were in decent condition. I grabbed one of each and headed back to the stairs. Carlos was now staring at the window high up on the wall with a length of rope in his hand. He seemed deep in thought, like he was measuring something. I bounded up the stairs to show Judy what I’d found and as I rounded the corner into the kitchen I nearly collided with Carlos.

“Whoa!” Carlos said.

But it couldn’t be Carlos. I’d just left him in the basement. Unless he’d somehow climbed out the window and raced around to the back door and into the kitchen, it couldn’t be him.

“Weren’t you just in the basement?” I asked.

“No way, man,” Carlos said. “That place gives me the creeps.”

Tammi came into the kitchen. “Are you okay?” she asked me.

“I… found the paint,” I said, unsure of what I’d seen, what I should say.

She took one look at my face and said, “Show me.”

I didn’t want to go downstairs again, but Tammi took my hand and led me down the stairs.

“Christ you’re cold,” Tammi whispered.

“I’m fine,” I said and I meant it. The glow of the bulb. The sound of Carlos and Judy talking in the kitchen. It was all so normal-seeming. I heard Tammi gasp and I looked to the place where I thought I’d seen Carlos but there was no one there. All that remained in the puddle of light on the floor was a length of rope tied into a noose.

Judy was upset.

“Tell me exactly what you saw,” she said, lighting a cigarette with a butt of another.

We were gathered on the porch, all of us, the Boo Crew, which was what we’d started calling ourselves. I explained what I’d seen on both of my trips to the basement.

Judy wanted to know what the person that wasn’t Carlos looked like, what he was doing, how he was dressed, the color of his hair. She untied the noose as I talked and when I was done with my story I was no longer sure of what I’d seen. The rope was just a rope. Maybe the basement was just a basement?

“Is this place haunted for real?” Devon asked.

“Of course not,” Judy said. “There’s no such thing as ghosts. The only people haunting this place is us.”

“But what about… the kid,” Carlos asked, unhappy about the prospect of having a doppelganger in our midst.

“This used to be a frat house,” Judy said. “The chapter was booted off campus for hazing violations. A pledge had to be hospitalized for alcohol poisoning but he claimed he’d been raped.”

“Oh god,” Tammi said.

“It gets worse,” Judy said, squinting through a cloud of cigarette smoke. “When it became clear the university wanted the whole thing to go away, the poor kid killed himself.”

“I heard about this,” Metal Mark said.

“He hung himself in the basement. So if this is part of your fright fest,” Judy said, looking at me and Tammi, “think again.”

“I swear I didn’t know anything about this,” I said.

Tammi was unusually quiet.

Judy dropped her cigarette and put it out with her shoe. “No scares in the basement. The basement is officially off limits.”

For the next couple weeks we were too busy to dwell on the ghost sighting as we transformed the house on dead confederate street into a house of horrors. Each bedroom had a different theme. There was the Well of Lost Souls, the Satanic Temple, The Slippy Slide of Gore. We populated these rooms with department store mannequins that we turned into witches, demons, and ghouls. Mark came up with an impressive set of bloody axes and chainsaws with the teeth taken out of them. I don’t know where he got them but they were great. The coup-de-grace was the Mad Scientist’s Laboratory, a feast for the senses with an abundance of smoke, props, and an actual Tesla coil that lit up the room with electric sparks.

It was incredible how thoroughly the house had changed in such a short period of time. The long hours we put in were paying off. It no longer felt like a court-ordered obligation, but something we were called to do. I couldn’t shake the feeling that the house embraced the change, that it somehow liked what we were doing to it. The back stairs, which originally struck me as a claustrophobic death trap, now seemed lustrous with shadows. I hesitate to use the word beautiful but that’s how it felt.

My feelings about the house were tied up with my feelings for Tammi. She flirted with me constantly, which I found paralyzing. When we were alone she stood really close to me and said things like, “Your eyes are incredible, you know that?”

I didn’t know that. My track record with girls was terrible. The one and only time I’d tried to approach a girl I liked was during a field trip to the zoo. I reached out to hold her hand in the bat cave. She let out a scream and shouted, “Don’t do that!”

I thought about Tammi constantly but the only time I felt comfortable with her was when we were talking about the house.

“Do you feel like it’s changing on its own?” I asked Tammi. We were upstairs on the landing, blacking out the windows with cardboard we’d decorated with bloody eyeballs.

“Get out!” she said. “I was thinking the same thing, but…”

“But what?” I asked.

“I was afraid to tell you.”

“Really?” I asked. We both stopped working on the window. The air felt supercharged somehow.

“I mean, look at the carpet. It looks brand new.”

I had noticed the carpet—I’d assumed Judy had run a steam-cleaner over it after hours—but was more surprised by Tammi’s admission that she cared enough about what I thought not to tell me things. I longed to tell Tammi how I felt about her but didn’t know how. Maybe you weren’t supposed to.

I couldn’t shake the feeling that the house embraced the change, that it somehow liked what we were doing to it. I hesitate to use the word beautiful but that’s how it felt.

“Wait here,” Tammi said. “I want to show you something.”

Tammi went into the Alien Abattoir while I finished hanging the cardboard. I had just finished when I saw a shadowy figure floating down the hallway toward me. The apparition’s face was a deathly pallor and its costume was that of a nun. I could feel a scream welling up inside me when the apparition spoke:

“How do I look?” It was Tammi.

“Amazing.” It was the truest thing I ever said.

Tammi laughed, she had a great laugh, and presented me with a matching costume.

“You want me to be a nun?” I asked, a little offended, a little turned on.

“Not just any kind of sister,” she said. “The dead kind.”

“Will you show me?” I somehow found the courage to say.

Tammi took me by the hand. “Come be dead with me.”

She led me to the makeshift graveyard we’d built together at the bottom of the stairs and we made out among the tombstones under a blanket of dead leaves.

I was working in the Clown Concentration Camp when I heard shouting outside on the porch. We were a day away from opening and we were all on edge. Bobby and Carlos had been snapping at each other all day and Metal Mark seemed unusually surly. Tammi was convinced he was stoned. She was worried he’d nuke his piss test and get kicked out of the Boo Crew. As the realization dawned on us that we were all depending on each other to pull this off, we started to freak out a little, but the scene out front had nothing to do with us.

Some preppy-looking frat guy in a yellow golf shirt tucked into khaki pants was yelling at Tammi, and he wasn’t alone. Two more frat guys were hanging out of a Volvo.

“Go away!” Tammi shouted.

“This is our house, you slut!” the man shouted.

I had a hammer in my hand and was surprised to see it raised in a threatening manner as I stepped out on the porch. The man turned to me and laughed.

“What are you going to do?”

I’d been using the hammer to nail a curtain into place but I could just as easily use it to cave in his cranium or smash the Volvo’s rectangular headlights. My dad had probably sold this car to his father. I hated those cars and the people who drove them, but that wasn’t really the question. The question was what could someone like me do to someone like him. As far as he was concerned, the answer was nothing. But I had a hammer and was ready to use it because I would do anything for Tammi, which the frat guy seemed to sense. He stepped off the porch and joined his brothers in the car where he produced a knife. He made little jabbing motions with the knife like it was an extension of his penis.

“I’ll be back for your girlfriend!” he yelled as the Volvo sped off. “This is our house!”

By now the rest of the Boo Crew had come out on the porch with confused expressions on their faces. Tammi was crying and Devon looked like he wanted to.

“What was that all about?” I asked.

Tammi blew past me. I followed her into the house and up the stairs. When I needed to ask Tammi something I could almost always find her in The Haunted Nunnery, which Tammi called The Clit Cloister. It’s the only room in the house that had a bed in it, which Tammi and I were screwing on every chance we got. She threw herself face down on the black velvet bedspread and bawled.

“He can’t hurt me,” she said. “He can’t!”

“I won’t let him,” I said.

“You don’t get it,” she said.

“What am I not getting?”

“He already has.”

“He already has what?”

And then I got it.

She didn’t tell me right away—“You have your secrets and I have mine”—but eventually she told me everything.

His name was Brett. They’d met last year. He invited her to a party but when she got there it was just some people standing around a keg on someone’s back porch and that’s the last thing she remembered about that night.

“You don’t have to tell me if you don’t want to,” I said.

“I want to. Are you sure you want to hear it?”

I said I was but I wasn’t sure, not then, not now, and after she told me what happened the night she blacked out at Brett’s party the only thing I was sure about was I would never let Brett hurt Tammi or anyone else ever again.

I thought I knew anger. I thought I knew shame. I was a paperboy. My job was to wander the streets in the dark, dropping off newspapers. Saint Al’s was a customer. I delivered to the convent. I delivered to the rectory. On Saturday mornings Father Burns would wait for me on the patio. It was fifteen steps up, maybe more, but he always waited for me at the top of the stairs, never the bottom. He wore the same robe every time. A dark forest green with satin trim. The robe was either too big or too small and it didn’t quite come together, exposing his bare white legs and dark uncircumcised penis. That’s all I saw, all I ever see when I think of Father Burns, who was also the principal at St. Al’s.

The first time I thought it was an accident, a slip-up. The second time I knew different. He wanted me to see it. I knew it in the place where I buried all my shame, my bad grades, my friendlessness, my lack of interest in sports, all the ways I disappointed my parents, because why else would Father Burns be showing me his dick if he didn’t think it was something I wanted to see?

I wrote a poem about it. That was my big mistake.

I put my feelings on paper—not what happened, just the feelings—and turned it in. I was horrified when my English teacher told me he’d submitted the poem to the school literary magazine and they intended to publish the work.

Fine, I thought, but that night, alone in my bedroom, I started to hyperventilate and couldn’t stop.

Not fine.

I thought I was going to die.

I read the poem again and realized I had nothing to worry about. There weren’t any naked priests in it. No dicks. Just a cocktail of rage, hopelessness, and desire. Not that different from the lyrics to the music the kids in the trench coat contingent listened to, some of whom ran the literary magazine. One of them told me she liked my poem. She said it in a tossed-off way that told me she really meant it.

So when the magazine came out and they asked me if I would read my poem at the school auditorium in front of the entire student body, I shocked them, my teachers, and the school psychologists and guidance counselors by saying yes. I even invited my parents.

Naturally, they didn’t come. But he did. Father Burns sat in the front row, smiling up at me as I stumbled over the words, crossing and uncrossing his legs.

That was the night I tried to burn down the church.

The Haunted House was a huge success. Each night the house filled with screams of terror and laughter and more terror, and the house liked it. It wasn’t something Tammi and I needed to talk about anymore. We just knew.

We were so busy. We were always putting on make-up or taking it off, changing costumes, cleaning up the carnage, fixing props that had been knocked over as guests fled in terror, filling the rooms with the sound of screams. We threw everything we had into making it work.

Word of mouth spread and as Halloween approached the line to get in got longer and longer. Some kids would go through the house, screaming their heads off the whole time, only to get in line and wait another hour to do it again.

The local news station sent a camera crew to do a story about the house and all the money we were raising for kids with cancer, which was a pretty big deal. After that, the lines went around the block. “What you kids are doing is amazing,” Judy said, “but after this I never want to see you again.” We knew she meant it in the kindest way possible.

The newspaper—the same one I used to deliver—sent a reporter over. He wanted to do a story about the success of the Young Offender Rehabilitation Program, bad kids turning their lives around.

“Get your sanctimonious ass out of here,” Judy told him, “and don’t come back.”

I don’t think I’ve loved anyone as much as I loved Judy at that moment.

What was the story of us?

It wasn’t about figuring out who we were and what we could do if we put our minds to it. It wasn’t an after-school special. It wasn’t about working off our community service hours. It wasn’t about getting high and having sex, although that was part of it. It wasn’t even about us. It was about Brett and the house that wanted him to die.

Of course Brett kept his promise and came back to the house. After Tammi told me what Brett had done to her, I knew he would make good on his threat. I told the others he would return and we were ready for him. We had weapons stashed all over the house. He had no idea what he was walking into.

On the night before Halloween he snuck in through the back door in the kitchen after we’d closed up for the night. Metal Mark and I were down in the lab, checking on the beer we’d stashed for the after party.

“What do you want, ninja boy?” Metal Mark said.

He was dressed all in black with a ski-mask over his face. The expensive kind that kids like him wore on actual ski trips.

I realized it was Brett right away. “Hey,” I said, and when he turned I saw that he was scared, probably of the Tesla coil, which was indeed fearsome. I hit him in the head with one of the fire extinguishers we kept in the lab because we were all a little afraid of the Tesla coil.

We laid Brett out on the lab table and peeled off his mask. By then everyone knew that Brett was a threat. We knew who he was and what he was about. We knew that he or people like him were responsible for trashing the house and spray painting Greek symbols on the walls. We knew what he came for and, more importantly, we knew what we had to do. We knew what the house wanted because we wanted it too.

There was just one problem.

Judy.

As much as we loved her, she worked for the county, and could ruin our lives in an instant. Judy was in charge of the money and until she finished counting out the take for the kids with cancer there was nothing we could do. Brett’s fate would have to wait.

“Let’s take him to the basement,” I said.

“Are you sure?” Carlos asked.

I wasn’t, and neither was Carlos, but Metal Mark was up for it.

I hooked my arms under Brett’s shoulders and Metal Mark grabbed his feet and we dragged him down the stairs. The basement felt dusty and cold. It was dusty and cold. None of us had been down there since Judy declared it off limits. We left Brett on the floor and went back up to the lab.

After Judy went home Tammi emptied the contents of Brett’s backpack on the table.

Handcuffs.

Duct tape.

Rope.

A knife so big it would embarrass Rambo.

This was the party Brett had planned for Tammi.

“He has to be stopped,” Tammi said.

“We do this together,” I said. I didn’t even have to think about it.

“I’m in,” Metal Mark said.

“Me too,” Carlos said.

“Ditto,” Bobby said.

That left Devon who maybe had the most to lose. He was still in middle school after all. “Screw that preppy jerk,” Devon said.

God I loved these people.

The house creaked its assent.

We were all in. Did we know what we were in for?

This is the question I keep asking myself. Maybe the others thought we’d give Brett the scare of his life, tie him up and leave him for a few days to reflect on his douchebag ways, but when Tammi picked up the knife I knew what she intended to do with it.

We followed her down the stairs. A gust of warm air blew through the basement. Maybe we’d left a window open. Maybe Brett had started a fire. But it wasn’t that kind of wind. It felt like the house exhaled, releasing a blast of history from its bones. When we reached the bottom of the stairs we understood. Brett’s body dangled from a rope thrown over a pipe. Neck broken, pants soiled, face blue. He was never going to hurt anyone ever again.

The following afternoon Judy found Brett. I don’t know how she knew he was down there, but she called each of us, the whole Boo Crew, to say that something happened and the Haunted House was shutting down. There was no need for us to come in that night, or ever again. She told us we should consider our community service complete, that we were in good standing with the county. She hoped that we would graduate from high school and become useful members of society, which we did.

Carlos and Bobby went to college and interned for competing computer companies, which they now run, but I’m still waiting on that time machine. Metal Mark did Metal Mark things—smashing cars, getting in fights, carrying on like a hellion. Eventually he made his way to rehab and last I heard he was working with addicts as a counselor. Devon got a nursing degree and went to New York to work with AIDS patients. After graduating from St. Al’s, Tammi joined the Air Force. We exchanged letters for a while but then the letters stopped coming, which is a shame, because I’d love to tell her what I’m up to these days. It would blow her mind to know that I teach poetry writing at St. Al’s.

Or maybe not. She was always a few steps ahead of me. Our plan to dispose of Brett’s body after we killed him involved burning the place down, which became unnecessary after the house took matters into its own hands. It was her idea to keep our costumes so that we could pay Father Burns a visit from time to time, dressed as undead nuns. What is a church, after all, but a haunted house?

The suicide note, however, was my idea. Down in the basement I scratched out a letter in which I confessed the secret shame of a love that dares not speak its name. The object of Brett’s obsession?

Father Burns of course.

It took a while for rumor to harden into something actionable, but when the inevitable raid came the police found all kinds of things among Father Burns’s possessions, including a cardboard box full of Polaroids of naked young men, many of whom had made their way through St. Al’s hallowed halls. A reporter for the paper, the same one who wanted to write about the Young Offenders Rehabilitation Program, wrote about the secret life of Father Burns, and the priest was sent to prison. Sometimes I send him poems.

Old habits die hard. I’m still an early riser and occasionally I walk my old paper route, especially in the fall when the leaves change color and the weather turns brisk. Sometimes I stroll past the old place to see how it’s holding up. My thoughts turn to Tammi and the Boo Crew and Brett. I thank the house for doing what it did on that fateful Halloween. I push a pile of leaves together on the porch, take the matches out of my pocket, and wait for a sign from the house on dead confederate street.

STORY:
Jim Ruland is the LA Times bestselling author of Corporate Rock Sucks: The Rise & Fall of SST Records, which was named a best book of 2022 by Pitchfork, Rolling Stone and Vanity Fair. He is also the co-author of Do What You Want with Bad Religion and My Damage with Keith Morris the founding vocalist of Black Flag, Circle Jerks, and OFF! Ruland is a frequent contributor to Razorcake fanzine and the Los Angeles Times. His novel, Make It Stop, was published by Rare Bird in April.

*

ART:
Carrie Anne Hudson is a visual artist from San Diego, California. She describes herself foremost as an illustrator and painter with a passion for pop surrealism and darker genres. Carrie’s artwork has been shown in galleries throughout the United States in a variety of group exhibitions, as well as featured in a variety of local magazines throughout southern California. In the summer of 2014, Carrie was accepted into a month-long artist residency in Transylvania, Romania. In 2017, she was nominated for the San Diego Art Prize.

Next Tuesday, we’ll feature an interview with Jim Ruland about this story, haunted houses, and more!

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