FICTION

As his new collection of ghost stories is published, author Adam Macqueen talks about his take on supernatural fiction and offers intriguing tips to get you writing your own spooky stories in the run-up to Halloween

I started writing ghost stories to send to friends and family in place of Christmas cards in 2005.

That’s not entirely accurate. The very first book I wrote at the age of four – my mum, who I dictated it to, said I was insistent it was a book and not just a story – had a ghost in it, and a dragon too. The next serious attempt at a novel, at 14, was also supernatural and ran to nine full chapters before I abandoned it, possibly on admitting to myself that it was a barely-tweaked retelling of The Quatermass Xperiment,, the 1955 version of which I had recently watched on TV.

I’ll stop myself there, and concede for the pedants among us that in none of his multiple iterations does Professor Bernard Quatermass encounter actual ghosts (though his author, Nigel Kneale, would go on to deliver two superb hauntings in the form of The Stone Tape and the long-lost The Road).) And if we are being strictly accurate – or at least as accurate as we can be with the inexplicable – only two of the nine stories in my collection, Haunted Tales, published by Swift Press this month, feature what are definitively dead people returned to wreak havoc on those still fortunate enough to be alive. Two and a half, allowing for ambiguity. But there are plenty of other entities in there that have their origins in a world not our own. Maybe we should go with Edgar Allen Poe’s Tales of Mystery & Imagination as a catch-all category. Or look back to the title that published much of H.P. Lovecraft’s early work in the 1920s, Weird Tales. Personally, I rather like the reliably grouchy Robert Aickman’s insistence that the masterpieces he wrote were simply ‘strange stories.’