Bisbee and the Haunted (Psycho-Mystery 27 on Acid)

David A. Ek’s Bisbee and the Haunted (Psycho-Mystery 27 on Acid) is a novel that keeps changing shape while you read it. It starts as a haunted hotel story, then folds in psychological strain, civic rot, local history, flood damage, media opportunism, and a running argument about whether places remember more than people do. That kind of sprawl can sink a book. Here, it gives the novel its odd intelligence.

Ek is drawn to hybrid forms. He wants ghost fiction, gothic melodrama, small-town satire, and emotional collapse in the same frame. He also wants the land itself to speak. Some chapters are filtered through Midnight Rock, the ancient stone presence looming over the town and the hotel below. That could have felt precious or ridiculous. Instead, it gives the novel a formal boldness that separates it from more standard haunted-house fare. The book is never content to be only one thing.

The Inn at Midnight Rock is the novel’s best invention. It is not just a spooky backdrop. It is an economic problem, a social stage, a historical artifact, and a magnet for projection. Tourists want hauntings. Journalists want scandal. Staff members want stability, belonging, or escape. The building takes all of that in and seems to distort it. Ek understands that a haunted place becomes most interesting when it reflects human need back in warped form.

The prose runs hot. Sometimes very hot. Ek likes grand statements, loaded images, and emotional extremes. Readers who prefer spare realism may resist that. Still, the style fits the book’s interests. This is not a restrained study of grief. It is a heightened story about damaged people trying to force meaning onto a place already crowded with legend, money trouble, and buried shame.

Jordan Smithers emerges as the most compelling figure. Her attachment to the inn, to Graeme, and to the stories the place makes possible gives the book its emotional instability. She is not easy, and that helps. Ek is better when he lets contradiction stay contradiction rather than smoothing it into simple motive.

Not everything lands. A few side characters feel pushed too broadly. Some turns arrive with more force than preparation. Yet the book’s ambition is real. Ek wants haunted fiction to carry psychic, historical, and even geological weight. He does not always balance those elements cleanly, but he keeps the novel alive by refusing to shrink it into something safer.

Readers open to genre-blending fiction will find a lot to admire here. Bisbee and the Haunted is shaggy, overheated, and often genuinely interesting. Its mess is part of its design.