Not just because Halloween is just a day away but because the ghost story is an incredible form. It was the writing form (along with poetry) that I cut my teeth on, and 40 some years later that got me through the first year of Covid lockdowns (in fact I sold my first ghost story this year, which was very cool). The genre is complex and mature – we might think of ghost stories and horror as the domain for our adolescence, but that’s not really the case. Not for me anyway. In lockdown the stories I wrote were populated – filled with people! – yes, some of them were dead, but they were still people. Of course, they were also fiction, so they weren’t real people, but that’s not the point. We turn to art to try and understand the world we live in, and there has been a lot to try to understand these last two and a half years. The dead in our stories help us to see differently the scary and sacred that life brings to us – I’m not talking religion but that which we cherish and might be terrified to lose, whether that’s our voices, rights, motivations, freedoms, familiar shelters. Loved ones.
I’ve been reading ghost stories, listening to them on podcasts – in fact I even started my own podcast to show off such stories written by women — and enjoying the chills they bring, but also the depth of emotion that reading about death, however obliquely, evokes. The place of the ghost story is familiar – it might be a house, forest, lake, church, stately home, apartment and so on and on — and the people of the story are familiar, too (friends, lovers, mothers, children, grandparents) but the situation is Other. When we are challenged, we make things other and if that other is terrifying, or in some ghost stories just plain heartbreaking, we are forced to try to understand why. We force ourselves to be scared in reading ghost stories (moreso in horror) because it helps us rehearse for the sacry shit lives throws at us, but in a safe way – the thing bang-bang-banging on the door in a ghost story is a ghost, in real life, and depending where you are, it might be soldiers, bailiffs, DWP, evictors, psychotic exes, policeman notifying you of a death. The ghosts at the end of the story go away because you’ve put the book down, but the feeling of unease remains. I think that when a writer writes a ghost story they’re aware of this – somewhere in the backs of their mind — yes, they intend to scare the shit out of you, but they scare themselves as much (maybe more), because even though the stories are fiction and the characters dead, the loss is real somewhere down the line. I don’t think it’s just me.
Books I’m reading include: Women’s Weird edited by Melissa Edmundson, Where the Wild Ladies Are by Matsuda Aoko (trans Polly Barton), The Shape of Fear by Elia Wilkinson Peattie, The Dangers of Smoking in Bed by Mariana Enriquez (trans Megan McDowell), Edith Nesbit: The Complete Supernatural Stories.