6. I’ve also found that I can appreciate the way that any particular story has been written, the sometimes slow revelation of a haunting, for example, building up the tension steadily, or the precise rhythms and measured beats within a tale that make it so effective, or how a writer draws the reader into events like an unwilling, but nevertheless fascinated, participant. In many cases it’s obvious where a writer got his cues from.

It opened my eyes in many ways. Ghosts have a strong presence in Indonesian culture and the white tiger that inhabits this story is not only the phantom inside the young murderer Margio but also a literal tiger that can be seen by the villagers.

Perhaps the ghost is a manifestation of grief, or being faked by a criminal who will be unmasked when you whip off the white sheet like Scooby-Doo? Every story has it’s kernel of truth, but sometimes it feels like that kernel was genetically cloned from a kernel in another state, creating clone-corn ghost stories. One could not just go and dig a gravewithout first honoring the gods and local spirits and purchasing the land from them. That created other problems, though – what could my ghost do? Ghosts of the Tsunami by Richard Lloyd Parry (2017)This award-winning non-fiction account of the 2011 tsunami that claimed tens of thousands of lives in Japan isn’t strictly a ghost story either, but it’s a stunning account of how the living are haunted by the need to reclaim their dead. Success! This site is best viewed while eating marshmallows around a campfire under a starry sky. I won’t lie: I then got jaded with the whole horror thing and went on to explore other territories. The statue was a rather eerie figure by day, frozen in …

The novel is prominent in modern Chinese culture and has been adapted into numerous television series and video games, even in Japanes…

If you haven’t read it yet, what’s wrong with you?

Beloved by Toni Morrison (1987)This great testament to the horrors of slavery opens with a haunting. It is truly the most malleable of forms. To get back to the literature side of things – in line with most people I suspect, in my late teens and well into my twenties I looked for something more ‘meaty’ (read ‘bloodier and nastier’) than anything the relatively tame ghost stories could offer (I also went the same way with film choices too). This site uses Akismet to reduce spam.

This is, I suppose, what I was ‘brought up on’ when it comes to my first forays into horror literature. As it’s the festive season I’ve decided to put aside my normal Scrooge-like persona and write about something a little more positive. That tale, more than any other, set off my love of ghost stories. One of the intriguing aspects of reading this unresolved story is that, seen through modern eyes, its ambiguities offer themselves up as metaphors for child neglect and sexual abuse within the home. Moreover, they were written in such an artful way that I was required to use my imagination to fill in the ‘blanks’, so to speak, exploiting the truism that what you can imagine is always a lot worse than anything an author could come up with. However, I did come across some gems during the course of my reading, like Brian Lumley for instance, Ramsey Campbell and, of course, Clive Barker. 1. In China, the ground under the earth was considered the property of the gods.

And we were all that stood between her and inheriting Father�s money when he died. 1.

It’s also very interesting from the perspective of the job I do, which is publishing the modern cadre of horror writers, to see where they’ve come from. From ancient times, the Chinese have created stories of demons and monsters to explain the things that go bump in the night.

Mog Wai / Monster 魔鬼 (mó guǐ)

I read a lot of instantly forgettable trashy horror pulp novels around that time which, after a while, all blurred into one indifferent mess.

Charles Dickens, ‘ The Signal-Man ‘ (1866).