How Ghosts Affect Relationships: Some Notes
I've been asked to take part in an event called Doors into the Dark: A Day of Weird Fiction and thought I'd read from my new novel, How Ghosts Affect Relationships , out next year on Sagging Meniscus Press , because I want people to be aware of its nascent existence, and because weird is a pretty fitting description of the book. Robert Aickman, a writing hero of mine, preferred "strange" stories. Hmm. Maybe there's a different weight to the word weird. Mark Fisher, in The Weird and the Eerie , identified both the weird and the eerie as having, in common, "a preoccupation with the strange. The strange – not the horrific…that which lies beyond standard perception, cognition and experience." So, is that what I've written? I suppose it is. He also defines "the uncanny" as "the strange within the familiar" and that's as neat a definition of the story as I can imagine. It may be my writing style. How Ghosts Affects Relation...
