The Haunted Book

Jeremy Dyson begins The Haunted Book telling the reader about his thwarted plans as a child to visit a genuine Hand of Glory (the mummified left hand of a hanged murderer, supposedly imbued with much magical power) which was kept at Whitby museum. He never found it, but we are to suppose that his childhood obsession with all things supernatural forms fuels his being drawn to investigate a number of 'real-life ghost stories, having been supplied a number of accounts by a journalist.

The first part of the book is a series of these ghost stories retold by Dyson from the 'facts' he has received, and incorporating many classic features - haunted houses, bodies at the end of the garden, monsters in asylums, creepy basements, with an accompanying narrative of his travels between the story's 'real' locations, and his impressions of the places. Slowly, details from these real life sections - and the apparition of a young girl with hair obscuring her face - begin to bleed into the other stories.

And lastly, several black pages, on which a disembodied voice talks the reader, or the character of a reader, back through the void of immersion in the book to the outside world; referring, perhaps, to the book's somewhat Borgesian intention - that in some way it is not only several books-within-a-book, but also a thing in itself that exists somewhere in spirit and not just on the pages - referred to in the quote above. And isn't that really what a ghost story is - something that haunts you for days after you've put the book away? Something that exists at the edge of imagination, spectral, fluttering and showing itself at unexpected moments?

And in a sense, aren't we all in the books that we read - immersed in the enjoyable ones, but still present in the ones we hate - a silent, ghostly observer of it's goings on? Perhaps we are the ghosts, and fiction is real. Whatever you think about that, there's plenty to enjoy in The Haunted Book, whether you're into ghost stories and psychical research, or the more postmodern implications of authorship.