Spooky stories for Halloween

It is surely significant that Ed Parnell’s first novel The Listeners was an updated examination of themes latent in Walter de la Mare’s famously spooky poem of that title. The author credits this predilection for the macabre to an aunt’s VHS recordings of the Quatermass stories in the 1970s, when he was just a small child. Since then he has become an aficionado of the genre, and in his latest book makes a journey through Britain, from Cornwall to the Scottish Highlands, to pin down his own passion for ghost stories while exploring our national obsession with writings on the supernatural.

Ghostland includes many of the genre’s key exponents, such as M.R. James, who is widely credited with liberating modern ghosts from their traditional Gothic settings of dilapidated mansions and decaying graveyards. There is also careful consideration of Arthur Machen, Algernon Blackwood, William Hope Hodgson, Robert Aickman and Alan Garner.

Part of the book’s achievement is Parnell’s willingness to wander far from the mainstream and to consider the broadest taxonomic subdivision of his field. Here are standard ghost stories, but also works of weird fiction, magic fiction, folk horror and cosmic horror. The author is equally well versed in the cinematic versions of his favourite literature, and provides a meticulous cross-reference to show us how the two art forms influenced each other.

He has a genuine soft spot for lesser-known figures in the field, such as John Gordon, author of children’s literature, whose second book, The House on the Brink (1970), while perhaps little read today, is described as a ‘wonderful novel’ and a cult classic. Gordon set much of his fiction in and around the town of Wisbech, where he drew on the vast skies and empty spaces of the Fens to create the weirdness in his writing.