Death is just the beginning
The Last Cohort
Reviews​
"What a wild ride."Katie Stewart, author of Ordinary Affect.​​
"This novel took me places I didn't expect."Barbara Henning, author of You, Me, and the Insects.
The Story
As a child, Olivia befriended a ghost who troubled the school playground. As a grad student in anthropology, Olivia aims to study hauntings. But her plans are stymied when she can’t get funding for her research. Worse, she and her fellow grads—Veronica and Ramesh—learn their program is being defunded as political protests roil the campus.
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The department chair, Stefan Driscoll, frets as he watches his students turn into virtual zombies. He fears they are losing their humanity—imagination, empathy, and thought itself—just as the humanities are under assault on campus. He agonizes over the imminent death of his daughter Alma from colon cancer, and he still laments his long-departed wife. She died under mysterious circumstance in Spain where he was doing fieldwork.
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Olivia is assigned to work in the anthropology archives over the summer. Her tasks are tedious and mind-numbing, until she stumbles upon Stefan’s fieldnotes from Spain. They recount the details of a séance in which a miega conjured up his wife’s spirit. Olivia realizes the séance provides a method for her own research. She enlists the grudging help of Veronica and Ramesh to conduct and record the spiritual encounter.
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Then all Hell breaks loose…
John Hartigan
As an anthropologist, I work with myths. I apply them to our current crises in hopes of generating imaginative responses. For The Last Cohort, I drew from colleagues’ research on ancient Mayan cosmology. I depict what might happen if sacrificed Mayan warriors were resurrected, uploaded and modified by an AI, then turned loose online. This threat is met by a trio of grad students who find the precarity of academia as challenging as the perils they face in Xibalba, the Mayan Underworld.
My next novel is an epic about the Spanish Armada wrecking on the Irish coast in 1588. I started it in 2018, after finishing fieldwork in Galicia, Spain, then traveling to Galway, Ireland. I became intrigued by the deep mythical and spiritual ties between Ireland and Spain, which are rooted in a shared Celtic past. Between Wind & Water beguilingly blends fantasy and history, with moments of magical realism, grounded by gritty historical details and naturalist perspectives.
Between Wind & Water
One night on Galway Bay, three fishermen are drowned by the King of Seals and their souls are captured by a mermaid. Their widows’ situations are dire, but their fates change as they are caught up in a clash of empires when the Spanish Armada wrecks on the Irish coast.
