'The Book' in The Virago Book of Ghost Stories

"It starts in classic ghost story territory. Like W. W. Jacobs’ The Monkey’s Paw , we start with a happy family, so you know it’s not going to go well. It’s about the Corbett family: Mr Corbett and his wife and their three children. It begins with Mr Corbett finding an odd gap in his bookshelf, which his kids have also noticed. Then he finds this ancient handwritten volume, which he becomes fascinated by. He reads a couple of pages of that, and then – most delightfully, for anyone who’s ever done an English literature degree – the book starts to poison his experience of reading any other authors. So he tries to read Charles Dickens , but “beneath the author’s sentimental pity for the weak and helpless, he could discern a revolting pleasure in cruelty and suffering.” Later he tries to read Stevenson and detects, he says, “self-pity masquerading as courage,” and in Treasure Island “an invalid’s sickly attraction to brutality.” He says Jane Austen and Charlotte Bronte are “a prying, sub-acid busybody” and “a raving, craving maenad seeking self-immolation on the altar of her frustrated passions.” Almost as if the book is jealously protecting itself by slighting its rivals. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . Mr Corbett is a financial speculator, and in the handwritten manuscript, an unseen hand starts to write messages, which he then interprets as ways to invest money. And of course, they all pay off. He realises that he has to start obeying these cryptic suggestions to the letter, but he doesn’t know who it is who is writing them. That central mystery doesn’t seem like it should sustain the whole story, but it really does. As his relationship with the book grows, he learns more Latin , because a lot of it is in Latin. The book seems to be the record of some kind of magus or magician, who was clearly doing something dark and evil. The manuscript says that “it wasn’t finished in my lifetime… the work is never ending.” So all the hints are there. And then the instructions begin to get more explicit. It’s just so much fun. Like in Antic Hay by Aldous Huxley, where a character buys a false beard and becomes a different person, a much more confident person because of this false beard… It feels like this strange book allows Mr Corbett to become a terrifyingly bold financial speculator, and he’s suddenly respected. It gives him courage, but also starts to feed on his darkest desires. At that point, it doesn’t matter whether or not it’s a real ghost, or all in his mind – the effect is the same. I find that interesting. If someone has moved out of a house because they believe it to be haunted, it doesn’t really matter if it’s really haunted. The net result has been the same. Houses have been demolished because they’ve been presumed to be haunted. So it was real to someone, real enough to have effects in the ‘real world’. Yes. The one place in this world you know is definitely haunted is your brain."