COVER REVEAL — Abandoned: Asylum
Today we’re revealing the cover of Abandoned: Asylum, the anthology edited by James Chambers. The book contains more than 50 photos taken by James himself of a literal abandoned asylum. One of those photos is featured on the cover. The Kickstarter for this book also launches today. Please share this link and support if you can!
St. Johnland Hospital, this place bristles with a sense of lost hope… For more than a century, these dormitories, fields, hospitals, and laboratories housed the distraught, the afflicted, the dangerous, troubled, and unwanted—and, far too often, those powerless to speak out against a world that rejected them.
Although its doors closed decades ago, its story didn’t end there.
The buildings still stand, decrepit and dark. Quiet trails still crisscross its wooded grounds. New things have taken up residence there. The forgotten and lost still cling to this place. Their voices whisper from the shadows or scream from the darkness.
In this anthology, nineteen authors and poets explore the abandoned grounds of St. Johnland Hospital to unearth its demons and devils, its forgotten experiments, its ghosts and spirits, and the secrets that yet reside in this place that bends time and memory beyond the everyday world.
Illustrated with more than 50 photographs of the abandoned grounds by James Chambers.
Authors include: Danielle Ackley-McPhail • Oliver Baer • Garrett Boatman • Liam Burke • Clay McLeod Chapman • Greg Chapman • Craig DiLouie • Maxwell I. Gold • Jamal Hodge • Chris Marrs • Elizabeth Massie • Lisa Morton • Robert P. Ottone • John Palisano • Terrie Leigh Relf • Kathleen Scheiner • Steven Van Patten • Brian W. Matthews • Mercedes M. Yardley
A NOTE FROM THE EDITOR
Around 1996-1997, I discovered the shuttered remains of the King’s Park Psychiatric Hospital in King’s Park, NY on Long Island. Once a major and historic institution, it had outlived its purpose as modern medicine discovered better ways to treat its patients. Now part of Nissequogue State Park, it offers scenic, wooded hiking trails along the Nissequogue River and its picturesque outlet into the Long Island Sound as well as ample space for bicycling and exploration.
Over the past thirty years, I have visited the park many times and spent hours photographing its natural beauty, deteriorating structures, and signs of illicit life: graffiti, trash, and vandalism. I have on occasion experienced odd occurrences there—the battery in my camera suddenly draining from full to zero in minutes, sounds drifting down from the upper floors of supposedly unoccupied buildings, strangers telling ominous stories of the hospital’s past like the horror movie cliché harbinger of doom. I’ve had more good times than weird there (although I don’t recommend visiting in the peak of summer if you’re squeamish about ticks), and I continue to revisit, watching the buildings succumb to demolition machines and time, and soccer and softball fields appear in the open spaces left behind.
The most puzzling episode in my wanderings there resulted in the book soon to be published by Raw Dog Screaming Press. A book printed from a manuscript found in a sodden cardboard box, pages and box stained by water, flecked with mold and mildew, and utterly irresistible. I cannot cite the source of this manuscript, whether some odd documentarian deposited it there to be found or if it came into being wholesale out of thin air—or, even more unnerving, was left by someone who slipped through from another layer of reality. Just as Mr. Enrico Biro reports in his notes, I too have noticed inconsistencies, oddities, and liminalities on the grounds of Kings Park Psychiatric Center, perhaps this world’s analog to St. Johnland Hospital.
Although such curious phenomena explain a great deal, they offer little reassurance as to what really remains within the crumbling brick walls of those forsaken buildings and beneath the soft, loamy soil upon which they stand. Most unsettling is the inexplicable synchronicity between the contents of the box and my photographs. It remains an unsolved mystery. Perhaps in the work that follows you will find answers I overlooked.
