What is it about Britain, asks Andrew Martin, that makes it such a fitting playground for the supernatural? We are, it seems, a nation primed for ghostliness; our history, our landscape, our very climate are inherently eerie.
In Ghoul Britannia, Martin takes a wry look at our haunted isle, goes to cursed houses, talks to psychics and believers, and studies exorcisms. He asks why some ghosts appear in libraries and others at the end of the bed, what ghosts like to wear, and whether you should feel nervous on a foggy, moonlit night…
Oh yes! It is true. Under the rather Victorian aspect of “Ada,” your very own Ms B is quoted, called a blogger and poet, and otherwise preserved for posterity (in the form of stories, if not quite ectoplasm) in this tiny tome, which you will find materialising in your local bookshop in time for the Christmas market. (And yes it really is called that.)
Ghoul Britannia, you might like to know, is by the famed author of last year’s Book at Bedtime How to Get Things Really Flat, which you may recall I mentioned at the time. A very engaging book about ironing white sheets…
You might also like to know that Andrew Martin, along with the friend whom he cites everywhere in the book as “David” (his real name, in fact, oddly; Andrew should maybe have called him “Ernest”), is co-author of a Very Good Play Indeed. It’s called (you may not be surprised to hear) Ghost Club. (There is almost nothing these two chaps don’t know about ghosts.) Ghost Club – based on and massively expanded from a short film David made a couple of years ago – is a cracking modern-day ghost story, with chills and laughs and really scary bits, and great characters, and a genuinely moving finale. I really hope someone will see the light, I mean the orb, now that Andrew has written this book, and put Ghost Club on a stage. It has all the ghostiness and none of the nastiness of The Woman in Black. (And yes, I have a heavily vested interest in this play! But I hope you understand that I wouldn’t say these things if they weren’t true.)
You might also like to know that my stories in Ghoul Britannia (how that makes me laugh) are true. I haven’t read the whole thing yet, but I did get to see a copy last night, and I can tell you that in at least one case he has expanded my own experience with information I didn’t even know… Now that is spooky.
There are those who will be surprised – but not actually surprised – to see the news that I have allied myself with a project of this type. Hi Mom. Because the Baroque mother is a world-class expert on Near Death Experiences, and subsequently has cause to know my aversion to big spaghetti dinners with roomfuls of people who all see dead people.
Okay now, if you’ll excuse me, I am home alone, and it’s dark out, and I have to go and try to think about something else quick. Maybe a nice cup of tea. The problem is that those stories really were true.
N.b., Andrew also writes these very entertaining period railway mysteries. And David takes these rather staggering photographs.
1 Comment
November 7, 2009 at 8:41 pm
[...] It was in honour of a book I’m actually in (pseudonymously; there are two of us called Katy), as I’ve said before – telling a few of the ghost stories in my vast (and true, however much the reviewers liked [...]