The story begins with Annabelle's seemingly common life circumstances: as a teenage girl, she feels that her parents do not spend enough time with her and that her sister Elizabeth dislikes her. The two girls spend very little time together, particularly as Elizabeth is absent for long periods and comes home only to sit at their computer for hours. This commonplace existence does not last long: on Annabelle's birthday, her parents and sister are killed in a tragic accident. Annabelle is left alone in their large Victorian house with only her adult friends, the Savages, to keep her company - that is, until Elizabeth comes to visit her one night and tells her that Annabelle must carry on Elizabeth's "chosen" task of helping ghosts to reach the afterlife by resolving the conflicts that keep them on earth.

With her large inheritance and home, Annabelle attempts to accommodate Joshua, a ghost who needs to figure out why he and his family died, in order to be at rest. Developing a close friendship, Annabelle and Joshua begin to uncover shocking secrets that affect both of them; it is Annabelle's parents' firm that brought about Joshua's death, as well as their own. With time running out and the firm hot on their trail, Annabelle realizes that she is fighting a cosmic battle of good and evil. However, at Joshua's family estate, Annabelle realizes the crucial clue that allows Annabelle to send Joshua and her parents to the afterlife.

Besides being a suspenseful ghost story, students will want to read Hauntings because it deals with the difficult topics of divorce, alcoholism, bullies, and suicide. Furthermore, these subplots will lend themselves to talking points with the book's secondary audience, parents.

As a middle school counselor for the past four years, and an eighth grade English teacher the 12 years prior to that, I have witnessed first hand how a lack of faith severely handicaps our youth as they face the trials and tribulations of growing up. That is why I have targeted 7th-12th graders with his book.

For years, Jennifer's daughter, Deana, had been predicting the future. It was considered a gift from God. Then the blessing became a curse. The little girl began dreaming of Him. The man in black haunted her nights, endlessly searching for her. The Tomorrow Man was slowly closing in.

Desperate to escape this unknown doom, Jennifer and the little girl flee their old, sheltered lives and Deana's neglectful father, heading west. They come to call Vancouver home, but despite all they've done, Deana's dreams frighteningly intensify. To make matters worse, Jennifer's male friends and peers seem to be uncommonly interested in her daughter. With all the men now in their lives, which one could be the dreaded Tomorrow Man?

Born without the ability to speak, a young boy grows up with no identity. He is unable to communicate with others, until one night when he wanders into an old cemetery. Inside he finds purpose. As the years pass and his appearance deteriorates, he becomes more of a local spook story. Intrigued, one man sets out to discover why this old man runs through the cemetery late at night.

The editors of The New Quarterly, when first reviewing my story submissions, concluded, rightly or wrongly, that my work fell into the category of 'Magic Realism'. 'Magic Realism', as one editor proceeded to define, was the "seamless blending of the ineffable and the concrete". The 'ineffable' or 'other reality' part of this definition is at the core of many of the stories in this collection.

The stories in Liquid Geography could be categorized as 'backyard fiction', or even 'transformative realism'. They all, more or less, take place in and around a home environment and conclude by literally 'spilling outside'; differences between what is 'real' and is 'not real', what is present, past or future, disintegrate and blur away.

The characters who inhabit or appear in these stories, are invariably destined, in one way or another, to experience glimpses and encounters with heightened or altered moments of cognition. They are not necessarily characters who are spiritually evolved or wise in any sense; they are not characters who have consciously embarked upon a path of higher understanding. They are generally very ordinary individuals leading seemingly ordinary lives. What they discover, however, is that reality as they believe they know it, is a slippery path where the 'unreal', 'super-real' or even 'magical' may (and can) present itself at any given moment.

Whether the characters in question have initiated this shift through some psychic turmoil or trauma that alters his or her patterns of perception, or whether there is a hidden 'other reality' containing different truths, becomes merely a matter of definition, and therefore moot.

Anna McKenzie's sheltered childhood was overwhelmed by the Roman Catholic Church. The house in which she was born was within yards of the church, her family's life revolved completely around the church, the priests and everything which flowed from them. As the fifth of seven children, she realised at a young age that she was different. Her likeness to her dead grandmother began as something of which she was proud, but eventually became her first ghost. At the age of twelve, Anna thought her ghost had been exorcised, but worse was to come when the Holy Mother Church, of which she had been such a loyal believer, turned out to be a ghost from which she could not extricate herself...that is, until tragedy had struck her friend and the realisation dawned on her that all was not what it seemed with this massive, all consuming, moneymaking and at times, life-destroying organisation, which she had grown to hate rather than love.

As Anna tried to unlock the handcuffs, by putting her thoughts and feelings down on paper, her life took a new turn. Her beliefs changed beyond recognition as her home city of Cardiff was rocked by the murder of a high profile cleric and her family life was rocked by a devastating revelation. Anna's story is moving, yet humorous. The book is dedicated to the author's parents who died, knowing nothing of what had been happening within their beloved church and more significantly within their beloved family. For that, she is eternally grateful.

As the faithful still struggle to deal with the realisation of the sins which have been committed against so many of their children, by men to whom they have gone to confess their sins, Anna finally manages to free herself from the most all-enveloping ghost in her life.

Bobby is used to the comforts of the modern world; but she is forced to change her days' routine or die. She can sit down and give up or dig in and make a decent life for herself then others who come into her unusual set of circumstances.

The narrator, the first person buried in an old California Gold Rush cemetery, uses his unique poisition as The Oldest Inhabitant to tell the stories of some of those who are buried there. These tales speak of the lives, hardships, and mishaps that were part of life in the 1850's, a time when the fever for riches caused tempers to flare and the worst and best of human nature played center stage.