Spooky

A new publication for fireside reading

And now for something completely different.

Ghost stories. Real experiences from actual people. I've been collecting them for a while and have finally got round to putting them into a collection.

The thirteen accounts in The Little Book of Ghost Stories are true in the sense that they are original experiences told to me by people I trust. They’ve arisen naturally out of talk around the table or fireside or in the course of conversation. They tell of everyday hauntings in homes and workplaces, or of moments of seeing when it seems the boundary between living and dead, past and present, has been temporarily lifted. The tone of their telling tends to be matter-of-fact, making for a low-key counterbalance to the ‘scary’ drama of the ghosts of popular culture.

As reports of experiences which took place in England and Wales, these stories also offer a different way of looking at place. They illustrate how places, far from being physical sites which provide a neutral backdrop against which things happen, involve layer upon layer of human experience and so are bound up with culture. In this sense, these tales of the supernatural are stories of place which are testimony to the human capacity for meaning-making.

The digital edition of this short volume comes just in time for Christmas or those interstitial days when the outside world is still quiet and the psyche is satiated with chatter, consumption and festive programmes. I've long liked the days between Christmas and the New Year precisely for their purposelessness and the way they create, in the northern hemisphere particularly, the ideal conditions for mental wandering - and wondering. A print edition will be published shortly before Halloween.

A word about book-buying and selling. Like many people, I've long been concerned about Amazon's dominance of the book market and the mega-corp's treatment of its employees. A personal last straw came with the news that the company has been providing unauthorised footage of people's movements to the US police recorded by its doorbell Ring. I no longer buy from Amazon.

But renouncing Amazon as an author is much more difficult, and all my publications are for sale on the site. Over time, I'll be looking for other distribution platforms for new work but, for now, this new publication will be on Amazon too. If you or someone you know would like a copy of the book but don't want to give Amazon custom, please get in touch with me directly.

Non-supernatural service will resume in the New Year!