Caribbean & Diaspora Storytelling
A Maroon House Collection · Caribbean ghost stories
The Unquiet
The Unquiet is a collection of Caribbean ghost stories about grief, haunting, ancestral presence, and the obligations between the living and the dead.
Three of an open collection
The collection
The dead do not always leave.
The Unquiet is a collection of Caribbean ghost stories about grief, haunting, ancestral presence, and the obligations between the living and the dead. It gathers original fiction about the houses, rivers, rituals, and family memories through which the past continues to live.
What do the living owe the dead?
Each story stands alone. Together they ask what the living owe the dead, and what it costs to keep them close — the uncertain boundary between keeping faith and refusing to let go.
The collection sits on the Maroon House Caribbean Gothic shelf, where the ghosts come out of Jamaican duppy tradition rather than borrowed horror convention.
The rivers in these stories have real ones behind them. Read the history of Swift River, Jamaica, a Portland village the floods of 1932 to 1943 emptied, and the place the House’s river stories keep returning to.
Contents
Stories in the collection
Nos. 01–03
After Miss Ivy dies, Althea prepares the house for nine nights of mourning. But the chair still rocks, the cup will not remain where it was left, and the final ritual asks her to release more than the dead.
Faye is thirty-four when her grandmother dies, and thirty-four when she learns she was paid for. What was given, and to whom, is the thing the family has never said out loud.
Papa Vernal dies on a Wednesday in 1994, and the following Sunday Grandma Ruby sets the table for six. Thirty years later somebody is still setting it, and nobody can quite say why.
Read next · A novel from the House
The Barrel
Icilda Morant · Jamaican ghost story
What a family owes, who pays, and what it costs to finally stop waiting for next year.
Every Christmas for twenty years, Desmond Morris shipped a barrel home to Jamaica. He died in March. In December, the barrel still comes to his sister Enid’s gate in the hills of St. Thomas, booked in his handwriting, and the names on its packing list are struck through one by one.
If these stories left you asking what the living owe the dead, The Barrel asks it at full length.
The collection continues
More stories will enter the House.
Future stories appear here as they are published — no empty placeholder cards.
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