Love & ghosts

Happy Valentine's Day, let's talk about ghosts!

Let’s address the giant red heart in the room: Valentine’s Day. For a holiday designed to celebrate love it brings up a range of feelings for people, not all of them positive. However, if are cosy in your romantic bower with your beloved, I’m not going to roll my eyes. My attitude is: wonderful! Enjoy the flowers and trysts.

There is nothing as tiresome as cynics trotting out lines about it being an invented holiday for the capitalist machine, and offering the unvarnished truth about the ‘real’ Saint Valentine.

Sidebar: I must mention Parentalia, however. It was a Roman festival of the dead, primarily honouring deceased family members. It began at noon on 13 February and had ended with a big public ceremony, the Feralia, on 21 February. Everything closed down in Rome as people retreated home or visited the graves of the dead to share a meal with them. Ovid warns, ‘And the grave must be honoured.’ Or there would be consequences.¹

As I alluded to in my last post history is notoriously shifty depending on who is writing it. This has occupied my mind since I attended college as a history & English undergraduate, but I’ll tackle this in a future newsletter.

I’ve been in a relationship for a long time, but before that I rarely pined for a romantic partner. Like many people I had a rocky early relationship and after that I swore off seeking someone else. I’ve always been able to occupy my time with books, learning, friends and social groups, and I am content in solitude.² I continue to attend events, travel on my own or go to the cinema by myself quite happily.

Sidebar: It’s funny how we say, ‘by myself’, as if I sit in a cinema, watching the film, and by my side is another ghostly version of me. Yet it’s kind of appropriate, as I’ll discuss later, due to the strange nature of our consciousness.

After several years of being single I remember thinking, ‘I’m happy to be on my own. I don’t need anyone else.’ About three weeks later I met my future partner, Martin. I’m pretty sure that once I was comfortable on my own (with my thoughts), I was capable of being with someone else.

I love romantic comedies though. This is not a shared interest with Martin, so I mostly watch them… on my own! I don’t mind, as I adore a well-crafted rom-com. I watch a lot of them (with a soft spot for cheese ball Christmas versions). What are your favourites? Comment on the post and let’s get some recommendations.

I particularly enjoy the old black and white classics such as The Philadelphia Story (1940) or His Girl Friday (1940), but I also love Moonstruck (1987) because it’s beautifully shot with a terrific cast, it has a whacky edge, demonstrates the craziness of families, and it offers an example of how we can (almost) reject love through fear.

‘Do you love him, Loretta?’ ‘Ma, I love him awful.’ ‘Oh, God, that’s too bad.’ (© MGM)

I have many other favourites, such as 10 Things I Hate About You (1999), Bridesmaids (2011), The Big Sick (2017), but for now let’s leave the land of sweetness and light and head into the world of mists and shadows.

Tomorrow I’m travelling to Derby in England to attend the UK Ghost Story Festival, which is an event many of my horror writer friends have recommended over the years. It may seem counter-intuitive but the horror scene in Ireland and the UK is friendly and welcoming (in general, there are always exceptions). To be more precise, Irish horror writers are few and scattered about, so some of us gravitate to the larger festivals in England which specialise in celebrating unsettling fiction and those who are compelled to write it.

I don’t only write horror, but long ago I realised that there is a seam of darkness in all my fiction, whether it is science fiction, fantasy, comedy or even mimetic. This was a useful epiphany and I’ve never attempted to ignore it. It would like saying I’m not tall while ducking under a doorway. So I made the decision to be unafraid to refer to myself as a horror writer.

Horror is a loaded term. It is both an emotion and a mode³, and has a range of expressions from uncanny, through weird and disturbing, all the way to exploitative and in your (half-eaten) face. I know many people who will not watch a horror film - but adore true crime podcasts - and even horror aficionados don't always enjoy every type of horror fiction/film/game.

Often other writers or journalists will term me ‘Gothic’ and I don’t mind as I’ve written and studied it, and my own work falls into that category at times. But it’s akin to admiring a splendid black cat and insisting it’s midnight grey, because you wish to appease the people who are superstitious about such felines.

It’s liberating to go to an event where you can listen to panel discussions about haunted houses and phantom beasts and fall into late night debates (often with drink in hand) about the difference between creepy and dreadful.

Since the topic is on my mind I decided to ponder ghost stories and being haunted for this newsletter.

Its gutted windows spill its darkest memories to those who step too close.

One of the reasons why I think people like ghost stories is that we haunt ourselves, primarily. Or our mind does. That amazing narrative-spinning brainbox is constantly trying to make sense of things, connect patterns of images or behaviour, solve problems, and perhaps operate in more elusive ways. It’s talking to us all the time. Whispering criticisms, composing preparatory conversations, raging about past slights, playing fragments of music, cringing over last night’s misjudged confession, reminding you to eat or imagining erotic couplings with strangers. Sometimes while you’re waiting to order an espresso.

So when we’re in our home late at night, and a floorboard creaks in an unoccupied room, our internal buddy rushes to fill in the details: it’s a masked serial killer, no the ghost of a lonely child, no the house settling, no it’s the bloody cat. But there’s Tom sitting on the arm of the sofa, his tail twitching, and his attention rapt by the connecting door. Is that another creak?

Now it’s urgent to turn on all the lights, grab a remote control (hey, it could be used as a cudgel!), and bang open that door to prove our imagination wrong.

Yes, it was just the blaring of ancient alarm systems set into the human mind to save us during an era when strange sounds could signify a sudden attack by hungry wolves, an ambush by a sneaky enemy… or an offended ancestral spirit who is furious you forgot to honour them with the correct libations!

But, unusual events happen all the time. If you ask people if they’ve ever glimpsed a spectre, there’s some light scoffing as they suss out if you’re receptive, followed by a story of that time in the empty warehouse, the night their nan died, or the door that will not remain shut. Our paleolithic-forged tuning forks vibrate to weird frequencies on occasion. I’ve seen rational people exhibit superstitious behaviour when they’re subjected to tense and spooky environments.

At the back of our minds a ‘what if?’ question pokes at the practical suggestions to the squeaky floorboard scenario. When we turn on the lights it’s an empty room. When electricity fails and mobile phones die, it’s a void into which our imagination projects its loudest, wildest fantasies, drowning out our stern logician who is patiently raising its finger.

If you ever want a primer about the eerie situations that happen to everyday people then I’d recommend perusing the ‘It Happened to Me’ column in the Fortean Times (‘a monthly magazine of news, reviews and research on strange phenomena and experiences, curiosities, prodigies and portents’) which remains one of my favourite magazines. Thanks to the amazing era we live in I can get a digital copy of this font of weirdness as a loan from my library every month. Which reminds me, I must download the latest issue…

Its great horned head, dusted with starlight, twisted to stare at you.

Finally, let’s wrap up by combining love and ghosts, and ponder the number of cinematic love stories that have featured ghosts.⁴ Death comes for us all, and the tragedy of losing a loved one rates as one of the most difficult situations all of us will experience. Believing that we are watched over by our beloved deceased during our time of grief can be an important succour to the living, and of course film-makers have explored the bittersweet tension this can cause.

The famous trifecta that springs to mind is Ghost (1987), A Chinese Ghost Story - Sien lui yau wan (1987) and Truly, Madly, Deeply (1990), but long before that there was The Ghost and Mrs. Muir (1947) and Portrait of Jennie (1948). There are far more.. do you have a soft spot for one?

Death is such an abrupt severance of relations that is is difficult for the mind to process the disconnect and to resolve the turbulent emotions it provokes. Many of our funerary rites emerged as a method to create boundaries between the living and the newly-deceased. It was understood that the bereft needed a transition period, with rites and tasks to do, surrounded by loved ones, to ease into their new existence. Mourners were emotionally vulnerable, and needed psychic protection from confused or disruptive phantoms (although those who remain breathing are often the worst troublemakers). These cultural traditions gave people rules about how to grieve, for how long, and how to mark the passing in a fashion that freed those left behind from the guilt of moving on with their lives.

In essence what we are doing is saying goodbye to the deceased in our minds. They have vanished so we revisit them in our memories along with commentary from our chattering monkeybrain. That can result in a rocky adjustment, but over time it can relax into happy remembrances (or a blank slate, depending on the nature of the dead person).

We haunt ourselves. Only we can exorcise our ghosts.

Or at least, come to friendly terms with them.

But on occasion, they escape our control…

About me and ghost stories:

I wrote an introduction last year to Flame Tree Publishing’s Irish Ghost Stories, and if you fancy reading my short stories, and some of them are spooky, then a good starting point is my collection, The Boughs Withered (When I Told Them My Dreams). I also wrote a point-and-click video game, called Jennifer Wilde, which features a 1920s French painter solving a mystery with the help of the ghost of Oscar Wilde. You can buy it now on Steam.

Tomorrow (15 February) sees the release of ‘Appassionato’ a one-shot comic I wrote for Opus Comics based ‘My Heart is Broken’, the famous Evanescence song. The cover artwork is by Kelly McKernan, Valeria Romanazzi drew and coloured the comic, and Jacob Bascle lettered. It includes a short follow-on story from mine called ‘Riaccendere’, which is written, drawn, coloured and lettered by Kelly. It should be available in all good comic book shops. Huge thanks to Amy Lee and Denton Tipton for this project. It is a ghostly love story, so we come full circle!

1. ‘But once, waging a long war with fierce weapons, / They neglected the Parentalia, Festival of the Dead. / It did not go unpunished: they say from that ominous day / Rome grew hot from funeral fires near the City. / I scarcely believe it, but they say that ancestral spirits / Came moaning from their tombs in the still of night, / And misshapen spirits, a bodiless throng, howled / Through the City streets, and through the broad fields.’ Fasti, Book II, Ovid. Translated by A. S. Kline.

2. This is not to say I was never lonely, merely that I understood that focusing on being in a relationship with another person wasn’t the solution. The worst scenario is to be in a relationship and still feel alone.

3. I think horror is best described as a mode rather than a genre because it transgresses genre (it is a subversive force) and it appears all art forms and expressions. It is is the flipside of comedy, which is equally slippery. Hence you can have a literary novel with a horror vein or a dark comedy.

4. I should also note that the idea of having a ghost spouse - a marriage to a deceased person - is an old tradition in several cultures. Sometimes it was a form of appeasement or to ward off bad luck, but in some cultures it was an important partnership for a medium or spiritual intercessor for a community. It was considered a source of strength and an important ally when undertaking risky esoteric work. To this day you can read stories of people in relationships with ghosts.