Changes

|title=The Haunted Book

|sort=Haunted Book, The

|borrow=Maybe

|isbn=9780857862426

|pages=352

|publisher=Canongate

|date=November 2012

|summary=A portmanteau of spooky stories that too often set their stall up – then leave, spooking unfulfilled.

}}

Typically atypical noises faced by someone alone in an empty house… a rock group reuniting at their old studios and finding there are more haunting traces of their passage than just their unremembered recordings… a nightmare for a round-the-world solo yachtsman when he gains a passenger… These could possibly count as entrants in any compendium of ghost stories. But what of their author, tasked to transfer reportage into readable non-fiction? Should he not know better about dabbling with the occult, in any shape or form? How long will it be before he finds himself staring at a ghost himself – one that has not confined itself to just the pages of the book he is currently writing, but has made itself known in volumes past?

[[Dolly by Susan Hill]] is a better choice for this – or any other – Hallowe'en, as it bends the format by asking quite what is a ghost, yet still satisfies completely, plot-wise. [[A Pregnant Ghost and Other Sexual Hauntings by Colin Waters]] is well worth a perusal for true-to-life ghost reportage.

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