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 Relationships is about a lot of things but, from the outset, I feel I must confirm there are ghosts in it. Real ghosts. Ghosts of people who died. Ghosts doomed to wander the earth without map or compass. Lonely, rudderless wraiths in search of Summerland. So, it's a ghost story. These ghosts are not just metaphors, they are ghosts, real ghosts, though ghosts are never just ghosts, and are always metaphors. The book is hardly horror. Spines might occasionally tingle but they're just as likely to curl with cringe. There are several sudden dips into the unheimlich, but largely it's a book about loneliness, isolation, invisibility and memory. The protagonist is not even given a given name. The badge he wears to work labels him Irwin, but he's not Irwin. Even when, ultimately, someone takes an interest in his history, all they can unearth is a nickname: even when he was alive, he was called The Phantom. He was a born ghost.

     He's a risky proposition as a protagonist. He's hard company. Any writing course would toughen him up, give him some agency, have him rescue a colicky waif from a burning orphanage. Lend him a bit of gumption, some sex appeal and patina of mystery. Sadly, for him, for me, and for the reader, that's just not who he is. In the way people tend to avoid a wet blanket, both literally and metaphorically, readers of this book are wrapped up in one for a surprisingly long time. We get to know Not Irwin intimately, clammily intimately, and are gifted something no one in his world is. We get to know him. Good or bad, we hang out with him, listen to his views, his self-justifications, his infatuations, his limboing self-esteem, but attentive readers will see something else, the way he seems to phase in an out of existence, the way he's sometimes missing from the mirror. He doesn't shave. He doesn't smell. Why is he so good at stealing things? Cameras never clock him; security guards don't sniff him out. It's only after the introduction of the other two protagonists – who are vivid, lively, flawed and fun – all becomes clear. I would argue you need to spend the time with him, experience his seedy, narrow, joyless world, to appreciate the epiphanies to come. Suddenly there's folk horror, John Barleycorn, ghost-sex, an angry confrontation in a train toilet, time travel, visions of other dimensions or other worlds, a flagship Wetherspoons, and a ghost called Grant who died balding but will now never lose his spectral hair.  

     People often ask me: why have you written this book, John? Did anyone ask you to? Do you imagine there's an audience for a book that's about ghosts, but which emphasises the mundanity of the afterlife and offers only snippets of a larger cosmology? A book that suggests the supernatural is not only completely real, an invisible adjunct to our own world, but is also tremendously dull. Indeed, the question what are ghosts for is repeated throughout the book, usually by the clueless ghosts themselves. This is a book about people who have died and are now seeking closure. They've got off the bus at the terminal and can't find their way home. They're separated from their mums on a supermarket shopping trip, now they're snotty and puce but still no one comes. Amazingly, Not Irwin's post-mortem life is much better than his lived experience. It's larger, he has more friends. He has a purpose, however vague that purpose might be. He becomes more socialised, rounder, friendlier. The morbid, little man of the opening chapters has begun to grow. Death becomes him.

     How Ghosts Affect Relationships, the title stolen from the band His Name Is Alive and first used by me for a painting – attached – I did thirty years ago, is funny. It's sad. It's strange. It's, to use Mark Fisher's definition, uncanny. It presents a few magnificently unambitious, damaged people, just getting by. Some of them can see ghosts, some of them are ghosts, some of them are haunted by ghosts, and each of them wants to be left alone to do deal with the trauma. The story doesn't let them. The story draws them all together so they can muddle it all out between them. The thing about being a ghost is that it doesn't stop you being a human being. As limited, as small, as boring, as magnificent, as immortal as that.

     You should read this book. If the spirits move you.