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– THE WRONG TURNING – there may be another possibility: that the story itself can perform a similar function, giving form to the threatening shadows, and in the process taming them, containing them. When the story is well told, maybe the very pleasure we take in the telling can help us deal with those fears – make them less menacing and more enchanting. My first memory of being gripped, scared, but also enthralled, by a ghost story goes back to when I was about five. I was with my mother in the kitchen, and David Davis, head of BBC’s Children’s Hour, was beginning a story on the radio. I’d heard that beautifully modulated, deliciously reassuring voice before, reading Winnie the Pooh and The Wind in the Willows, and I made myself comfortable in preparation for a similar ‘Listen with Mother’ session. What I got, however, was M. R. James’s terrifying The Haunted Doll’s House, in which two children are somehow made away with by the hideous, frog-faced apparition of the rich grandfather their coldly avaricious parents have obviously murdered. I remember spending a fearful, truly haunted night – and yet I was also hooked. Was this pure emotional masochism on my part, or was there a sense that I needed to face something down? To peer into the darkness that so frightened me? Could it even be that I’d begun to realise what Thomas Hardy had grasped: that, ‘If a way to the better there be, it exacts a full look at the worst’? After decades of grappling with the dread and 2
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– Introduction – weird exhilaration that goes with the bipolar condition I have suffered with since my teens, I’d like to think that I was close to the right track. Human beings have always loved frightening and being frightened by each other – within reason, of course, and as long as one retains that sense of being in a fundamentally ‘safe space’. An adrenaline rush, followed by a pleasurable dopamine release when one draws oneself up, looks around, and remembers that it’s all make-believe – maybe for many that’s all it ever needs to be. But for others, and especially for some of the troubled men and women who wove these stories together in the first place, I suspect that it was more than that. Looking back on the ghost stories that riveted me as a teenager and as a young adult, I’m struck by how many of them contain descriptions of states of mind strongly reminiscent of my own more unpleasant episodes. Picture M. R. James’s unfortunate scholar Dunning, in Casting the Runes, on his way back from the solidly rational British Museum to his reassuringly dull suburban dwelling place, unaware that a curse has been placed upon him: More than once on his way home that day Mr. Dunning confessed to himself that he did not look forward with his usual cheerfulness to a solitary evening. It seemed to him that something ill-defined and impalpable had stepped between him and his fellow-men – had taken him in charge, as it were. 3

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– THE WRONG TURNING –

there may be another possibility: that the story itself can perform a similar function, giving form to the threatening shadows, and in the process taming them, containing them. When the story is well told, maybe the very pleasure we take in the telling can help us deal with those fears – make them less menacing and more enchanting.

My first memory of being gripped, scared, but also enthralled, by a ghost story goes back to when I was about five. I was with my mother in the kitchen, and David Davis, head of BBC’s Children’s Hour, was beginning a story on the radio. I’d heard that beautifully modulated, deliciously reassuring voice before, reading Winnie the Pooh and The Wind in the Willows, and I made myself comfortable in preparation for a similar ‘Listen with Mother’ session. What I got, however, was M. R. James’s terrifying The Haunted Doll’s House, in which two children are somehow made away with by the hideous, frog-faced apparition of the rich grandfather their coldly avaricious parents have obviously murdered. I remember spending a fearful, truly haunted night – and yet I was also hooked. Was this pure emotional masochism on my part, or was there a sense that I needed to face something down? To peer into the darkness that so frightened me? Could it even be that I’d begun to realise what Thomas Hardy had grasped: that, ‘If a way to the better there be, it exacts a full look at the worst’?

After decades of grappling with the dread and

2

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