“Weird stories for weird times”, it says on the back.
It’s a collection of short stories, some only half a page long (and they wouldn’t look out of place in Nextdoorland) and others longer. The subtitle is “Stories of Ghosts”. Where exactly the ghosts are coming from is unclear. In one story a woman rents an air bnb down on the beach and is haunted by the voices of the previous occupants of the house. At first it’s just period bickering between the departed husband and wife, like recorded conversations from long ago. Until the woman gets home one day and the voices turn contemporary – my spine was chilled. In another story a detective makes his living tracking down people who have “vanished inside their own lives”. It gets to the point we don’t know who’s a ghost and who’s real – there’s a Lynchian tale about a man whose ex keeps sending him video clips of her sightings of him on the underground, except he’s dressed differently, and carries a shoulder bag which is not his style, and has a different expression etc. Obviously it’s not him – he doesn’t even use that particular tube line. But perhaps he doesn’t realize… it’s so fucked up.
None of the stories has a satisfying outcome. But they’re always set near water, usually the Thames, often in the near future with the natives dropping like flies from global warming (Thames Fever). Water seems to be the metaphor for the immanence versus transcendence theme that slinks through all of the stories – where the ghosts come from (transcendent from another world, immanent from this one – but which is worse, and is it bad).
It’s fucking brilliant writing. Especially in some of the shorter things, which are very self-referential and “postmodern”.
