From the magazine Julie Burchill

Modern-day ghosts: Haunted Tales, by Adam Macqueen, reviewed

Dark, unsettling stories set mostly in the world of social media and panic rooms are, strikingly, as much about love as death – and how love is stronger

Julie Burchill Julie Burchill
Adam Macqueen Adrian Travis
EXPLORE THE ISSUE 14 December 2024
issue 14 December 2024

I don’t approve of ghosts, from the sublime (I generally just mouth the words ‘Holy Ghost’ in church, as I don’t want to pledge allegiance to something I can’t help but envision looking like the traditional sheet-based model) to the ridiculous (I would charge all ‘mediums’ with fraud). If ghosts were invariably like poltergeists (the Mrs Thatchers of the spirit world), I might have more time for them. But as it is, I just want to shake them and tell them to sort themselves out.

Having said that, Adam Macqueen’s Haunted Tales is a cracking little book. As befits a writer who went to Private Eye for work experience and never left, it’s knowing and waspish; nonetheless, the stories read like a labour of love. I was only half way through the first – the beautifully named and heartbreakingly perfect ‘The Wrong Teletubby’ – when I thought of the John Barth line: ‘In art, as in love-making, heartfelt ineptitude has its appeal and so does heartless skill – but what you want is passionate virtuosity.’

This is a collection set mostly in the modern world of social media and panic rooms, played out by urban twinks and jaded downsizers. I was happy to note that there is no ‘funny business’ between the living and the dead, as is increasingly the case in contemporary ghost stories. M.R. James and E.R. James never should meet. But it’s striking that the stories are as much about love as about death – in short, that love is stronger than death.

Macqueen is an elegant writer, and you can feel him fastidiously resisting the temptation to pile on the cheap thrills when one plain line will be far better. Still, there’s something spectacular about his use of language. A father grieving for his son sees him ‘disappear impossibly into the ground’. With the birth of Christ, ‘something new came into the world and made everything different’. Freewheeling on a bicycle down a hill is ‘a thrilling form of nostalgia’. There’s a lovely Afterword in which Macqueen – in an unusually generous way fora writer – lists all the authors who inspired the stories, and urges the reader to ‘seek out their work. Devour it. Let them live on’. In a few years’ time, his own name might easily be added.

I’m not convinced about giving people books as gifts (unless one wrote them oneself), as it’s both intimate and hit-and-miss, which is a strange combination. I don’t ever recall reading more than the first chapter of a book a friend has given me, as I feel I’m being lectured in some silent, absent way. But I’d make an exception for this one, now that the nights have drawn in. With its gorgeous combination of shimmering style and seditious substance, it would be a lovely present. Ghosts are all very well in their place, I suppose – and that’s on the printed page during autumn and winter, with a Maple Old Fashioned to hand and a Feu de Bois candle crackling. But I still don’t approve of them.

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