When the authors themselves warn that a book may be too depressing, and some reader/reviewers complain about it being “slow”, I pay attention. This, I think, might be a book for me.

I appreciate storytellers who trust the story. Who will let a narrative unforcedly unfold. And I appreciate artists who leaven the buffet of inspirational and aspirational fare with a normalizing blast of reality. I am moved by the beauty of the mundane, commonplace sorrows interwoven with the more marquee-worthy joys of trekking through a human life, and applaud those who see, share and amplify them.

Not that “mundane” or “commonplace” are apt descriptors of Blind Walls (a “blind wall” is a blank wall, a wall without an opening). Set in a metastasizing mansion based on the Winchester Mystery House – where, as in the book’s Weatherlee House, an eccentric, haunted heiress once mandated ongoing, increasingly labyrinthine construction for reasons of her own – the story is ghost-plagued in every way, featuring characters in extremis and operating far from any ordinary baseline.

The narrator, Raymond Smollett, is acerbic and self-deprecating, a stonily clear-eyed weaver of baroquely beautiful sentences about his bleak observations. He is aging, lonely, and retiring from his thirty-year career as “Mouthpiece of the Dead” – a tour guide at Weatherlee House. Counter-intuitively (or perfectly) this seer-and-sayer is going blind. He knows the walls and windings of the maze-like mausoleum well enough to conduct his last tour anyway. He no longer needs to see, with his eyes, passageways that are engraved on his psyche.

Blind Walls is the story of the sightless tour guide’s last tour. It is also the story of those who accompany this tour, ghosts whose stories Smollett has told into rote repetitions, appearing for the first time as walking, talking entities on the dark stage of his internal vision.

What does Sophia Weatherlee, the afore-mentioned Heiress who “spat pain like hot grease” have to say for herself? How did the young carpenter Chuck Ratowitz, lured in by the promise of money and endless opportunities for craftsmanship, fall in thrall to, not Sophia, but the house itself? What joys did that relationship afford him? What sacrifices did it exact?

Ghosts as revenants, ghosts as memories, ghosts as misunderstandings and regrets, Blind Walls is a darkly gentle, languid ghost story that meanders like Weatherlee House itself. Both the past and the future are specters, here, and the authors know that the scariest things are the traps that we build for ourselves.

Find Bishop and Conrad at www.damnedfool.com, home of WordWorkers Press. The book is also available through Amazon.

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