Tag: ghost stories

Council estates, motorway underpasses, bypass hotels, concrete cathedrals and run-down pubs. Places we all know, that we see where we live in suburbs and towns. Why shouldn’t they be haunted?

Municipal Gothic, my new collection of ghost stories, shows that they very much can be. It is now available as a paperback via Amazon, at £8.99 in the UK, $12 in the US and around the world at various prices.

In these thirteen stories you’ll meet a demonic black dog tasked with administering a lineal curse in the age of sperm donation; a witch’s familiar forced to live off fried chicken bones; an architect whose buildings can drive you mad; headless villains, and more.

It includes a revised version of ‘Modern Buildings in Wessex’, originally published as a zine or chapbook to some acclaim in 2020. It’s ghost story in the form of an architectural guide – M.R. James meets Ian Nairn.

David Southwell, of Hookland fame, is a fan of this particular piece which is how I got up the nerve to ask him to supply a foreword for the collection. He has plenty of interesting things to say about how ghost stories work, about working class fiction and, of course, about the power of plausible fake ephemera to conjure places that don’t exist.

In a similar vein, you’ll also find a new piece: ‘An Oral History of the Greater London Exorcism Authority’. Inspired by the kind of self-congratulatory in-house publications put out by public bodies in the 1970s and 80s, and by my love of institutional branding, it started life as a few mocked-up images on Twitter…

https://twitter.com/MrRayNewman/status/1324078769586536452

…but before long, I knew I’d have to write something more substantial to back up those ideas. It became an exercise in tone of voice – could I write first-hand testimony from multiple people? (Neville Hutchinson, the GLEA engineer who does not believe, and his colleague Ernest ‘Cabbage’ Lacomber are my favourites, I think.)

‘The Curse Follows the Seed’ is, as they say, ‘a very personal piece’ for reasons you might be able to work out when you’ve read it. It was the first story I wrote with the concept of municipal gothic in mind. Has anyone ever before set a key scene in a story in the area by the bins in a supermarket car park? I can’t help myself.

Other stories in the collection evolved from an abandoned novel. Why, when I try to write social realism, do ghosts, premonitions and black dogs keep turning up? See ‘Who Took Mary Cook’ for evidence of this.

Certain pieces emerged slowly, over the course of years, as I worked on them with my Wednesday night writers’ group. I must thank Andy Hamilton, Corinne Dobinson, Mike Manson and Piers Marter, and others who have come and gone, for their encouragement and advice. They saw scraps of ideas and helped me find the way, as with ‘Protected By Occupation’, which first landed with them in 2019 as a scrappy period piece inspired by the Lamb Inn haunting (PDF, bris.ac.uk).

Please do buy a copy of the book and let me know what you think. Or, more importantly, let Amazon and Goodreads know what you think – a quick rating and review is worth more than you can imagine.