Featured Publications
Valley Versus Vision
Valley Versus Vision is a folk horror descent into the haunted layers of memory, trauma, and historical obsession. Set in Corvallis, Oregon, the novel follows Romas, a Lithuanian immigrant working in a local hospital, whose quiet life begins to unravel as he becomes consumed by the town’s buried past. His fixation centers on Franz Edmund Creffield, a real-life cult leader whose early 20th-century presence left a psychic scar on the region. As Romas digs deeper, history refuses to stay buried, contaminating the present with echoes of ecstatic belief and communal collapse.
Portland Witch House
Portland Witch House is a memoir relating identity to Jahan Ihsan's twelve-year photographic study of 'countercultural' personae: subjects who often engaged in outsider religion and ritual. This study was documented using antique and vintage film cameras. Short stories accompany the portraits of Jack Donovan, an Esozone visit from artist Paul Laffoley, author Tracy Twyman, musician Rachael Kozak (aka Hecate), and Satanist Diabolus Rex Church, as well as many other faces and evocative bodies.
Valley Versus Vector
Valley Versus Vector is a psychoanalytic folk horror novel that plunges into the depths of abjection, trauma, and bodily transgression. When Ellis Horning, a nurse at Christ Hospital in Oregon, experiences a necrophilic rupture with a deceased patient, his psyche fractures, opening a conduit to a sentient bacterial intelligence known as the Christ Contagion. Haunted by childhood guilt and drawn into a hallucinatory communion with the river’s divine ecology, Ellis becomes the site of a metaphysical infection that reconfigures identity, desire, and the limits of the human. Building on Julia Kristeva’s theory of abjection within a folk horror and ecological mystical setting, Valley Versus Vector is a descent into the horror of becoming set within the landscapes of Corvallis, Oregon, and Greenville, South Carolina.
Coming Summer 2026
THE BURL: A Valley Versus Novel by Jahan Brian Ihsan
The Burl: A Valley Versus Novel
Coming Summer 2026 from Teasel House
In heart of the Willamette Valley, grief swells. Claire and Noah's loss seeps into the walls, the soil, the very seams of the earth, birthing something patient and hungry. A root that feeds on milk and memory, a child that isn't theirs but claims them anyway.
Drawing from the shadowed folklore of injury and renewal,
with a dash of literary psychoanalytic theory fused with Cascadia's subterranean pulse.
The Burl is a standalone plunge into parental horror, where the land listens in an amoral cleanse.
The Burl, the third standalone novel in Jahan Brian Ihsan’s acclaimed Valley Versus series.
Each book in the series exists within the same damp, haunted Pacific Northwest universe
but stands entirely alone with no prior reading required.
In The Burl, Ihsan strips away comfort and delivers his most unsettling work yet:
a precise, unrelenting exploration of parental grief, disembodied perception,
and the quiet terror of separation.
Jahan Brian Ihsan's paintings, photography, and books are human-made original works.
Teasel House uses AI as a production tool for select YouTube video promos,
for example, heightened visuals regarding folklore (imagery of the god Pan, etc.).
Jahan
Ihsan
Author, MA Comparative Religion
Jahan Brian Ihsan is a writer and visual artist whose work explores the intersections of personal memory, cultural inheritance, and historical trauma. Raised in the American South, he developed an early sensitivity to the way history lingers beneath the surface of everyday life—the ghosts of the antebellum era haunting columned porches from Greenville, South Carolina to the cemeteries of Savannah, Georgia. In the charismatic churches of the Appalachians, where ecstatic snake handling still occurs, he witnessed how belief can blur into spectacle, and how the sacred often carries a shadow.
Now based in the Pacific Northwest, Ihsan channels these layered geographies into novels that walk the line between personal narrative and cultural haunting.
Key Themes:
Ihsan's work is unified by motifs of abjection (drawing from Julia Kristeva's theory of repulsion and fascination with the abject body), historical trauma, and ecological revenge—where landscapes themselves become sentient witnesses to human folly. Common elements include:
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Bodily transgression.
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Identity mutation under cultural pressures.
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The "horror of becoming," where personal and collective memories erupt into the present.
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Settings like the misty Willamette Valley or humid Southern cemeteries symbolize buried histories, both personal and communal.
Influences span gothic literature, psychoanalytic theory, and folk traditions, with a nod to real occult histories.
Jahan has an MA in Comparative Religion from Claremont School of Theology and a BA in English Literature and Writing from Marylhurst University.
Recent Publications:
Valley Versus Vector, Publisher: Teasel House, September 22, 2025.
Valley Versus Vision, Publisher: Teasel House, June 20, 2024.
The Center for Process Studies: Conferences and Conversations, December 2022.
Portland Witch House, Publisher: Blurb, May 2022.
Contributions/Articles:
Ihsan, Jahan Brian. "Featured Works in Process Thought." Process Perspectives, Fall 2023, pp. 74–75.
Jahan Ihsan's photography has also been featured in The Essential Paul Laffoley: Works from the Boston Visionary Cell, Publisher: University of Chicago Press, 2016, and in a variety of publications and magazines.