The Memoirs of a Ghost

"Unfortunately, it’s quite an obscurity. This was published in 1947, and there may be some debate about whether or not it’s weird fiction – but the main character is a ghost, what more do you want? Stonier wrote a comic novel originally called Shaving Through The Blitz . This is his follow-up. The main character in this book is killed by a bomb during the Blitz right away, and this is his experience as a ghost. He is wandering; he doesn’t move on, he just becomes a mute, perennial witness. He’s still subject to terror. Being dead is depicted as nightmarish, but its intensity is very quiet. It’s not about being chased by monsters or anything like that. It’s more about a feeling of outsideness, which Stonier captures so well. The ghost is more or less like a homeless person. I remember stumbling across this book purely based on the strength of the title, and then reading it and being completely stunned by the beauty of the writing. It’s a gorgeously written book, the prose is immaculate. You can just open it anywhere… Here, this is the beginning of a chapter I just chose at random: “From my corridor I watched the flakes falling, hurrying, delaying, inveigling, with a soft touch of nightmare. My hands were quite blue. I had been driven by the cold to the shelter of this corridor, which ran alongside a ruined shop; the farther end, where one might have expected a staircase, had been blocked by rubble. And there, with knees drawn up, I sat staring at the cinematograph of the snow.” You dip into this book anywhere, and there’s this very careful, vivid, descriptive prose. You couldn’t sustain this density for a very long book – it’s too concentrated, it would be exhausting to read. It occupies just the right amount of space. It could be said that this is too metaphorical or poetic to be weird fiction. It doesn’t matter, because it’s a good book and worth reading, whether it’s technically weird or not. But the aesthetic effect of it is like weird fiction, in that it helps to make us see things around us as mysterious. From the point of view of a ghost, everything ordinary becomes alluring and exotic, because you’re now incomprehensibly divorced from everything. It’s not yours anymore. That adds mystery and poignance, and gives the story its power. This is a very particular response to a devastating war, to actual atrocity. It does what a lot of the best poetry does: it takes painful, difficult things, and without in any way failing to give what is owed to that pain, it nevertheless makes it beautiful. You acquire a kind of power over it by telling its story and by finding beauty in it. You’re not excusing it. You’re doing what you have to do to continue, and to keep it from killing you. That helps us understand what ghosts are. They’re not just an arbitrarily conjured menace – they’re more meaningful than that. They have to do with memory and so on, but they also have to do with a certain kind of experience… You can have an experience where you feel like a ghost, in the sense that you’re somehow not part of what’s around you. A good ghost story can reach that feeling and express it very efficiently. This isn’t a book with a plot. There’s certainly no mystery: we know he’s dead, he knows he’s dead. It’s more like a sustained meditation on life and death. I think for all that it has a kind of horror to it, and he doesn’t sugarcoat what this experience is like, it’s a healing book. If you’ve gone through any experience that’s at all like this, or if you suffer from depression, this is a book that is not going to make you better, but you can have a conversation with. And you can understand, too, that this is part and parcel of the human experience. That’s heavy-handed praise, but the main reason to read it is that it’s beautiful. Come for the beautiful prose, and stay for whatever ideas it gives you. It can be… A lot of weird fiction is very quaint and cozy, and those are typically the more reassuring stories, where the ghost reappears and points out their murderer and justice is done and there’s comeuppance. Those stories tell us that the universe is fundamentally moral. But you will see some weird fiction that gets formally innovative, in some cases more obviously than others – like Robert Aickman, for example. His work isn’t weird-looking on the page or anything, and his tone is usually rather bland, but there’s an interesting dichotomy between the bland tone and the utterly bizarre things that he’s describing; it’s almost aggressively normal, in a way that throws you off. So there can be that kind of subtle innovation… Weird fiction often plays with perspective in ways that other stories don’t. You can go all the way back to Poe. “The Imp of the Perverse” , when you start reading it, is a lecture or an essay about an interesting psychological phenomenon, and then, about halfway through, the speaker starts casually referring to how he murdered his cousin. Poe’s pulled a trick there. And there’s an irony, which Jackson uses all the time in a much more subtle way, where you have to ask, “Who am I, watching this?” And sometimes there’s use of epistolary formats or things like that, ways of blocking off parts of the narrative so you don’t see too much too quickly… Those are aspects of form that are often important in weird fiction. Then you get into what is called ‘new weird’, which involves more modern writers like China Miéville . There’s a percolation of literary techniques from modernism and post-modernism, new techniques and approaches being brought into weird fiction to enrich the genre. M. John Harrison did that earlier, Paul G. Tremblay does that now… Pest centres around a character named Chalo, who leads a double life, or maybe multiple lives over different incarnations. On the one hand, he’s a very large civil engineer from Southern California, born in Bangladesh; but either before or after that life or concurrent with it, he’s also a wild Tibetan Yak. So we switch back and forth between his human life and his yak life. In his yak life, the main plot line involves the impending rut and how he’s going to deal with that. In his human life, he’s been asked by a very Californian guru-wizard-sage type to design and help construct a campus on Catalina Island, which is just off the coast of Southern California, where he prophesies that something is going to come and visit Earth. He’s asking Chalo to design and build the place where that will happen. So you know – a typical book. As for how the book came about… I keep my antenna out for ideas that I find striking, I collect them over a period of time, and then I start to get an inkling of how they can fit together – and more importantly, the ones that want to fit together. No, I don’t have a three-act structure with bullet points. You write how you have to write, all that matters is whether the end result is good; I just personally feel like, if I’m going to write a detailed outline of what’s going to happen, then just publish that. For me, I want to surrender a lot of the control to the book and the characters, and I need to know that what’s happening is happening because of the characters, rather than what I need to happen. There’ll be a certain amount of what I need in there, which is fine – if it’s a struggle, that’s better, because then I feel there’s something that’s resisting or disagreeing, and it’s alive. It’s not for me to control it. It’s for me to hear what it’s saying and occasionally reason with it and say, “That’s not going to work”, or “Don’t go there.” And maybe it’ll grudgingly agree, or maybe just fold its arms and refuse to budge until I do as it tells me. That, for me, is a lot of the joy of the writing of the book – the way that the imaginary elements take on a life of their own and run amok. I know how my books will end. I have that in view, and I know there’s certain key moments that have to happen. Not because the plot says, “We have to have a climax” – it’s more like, I vividly saw this. The struggle is more keeping it from becoming too chaotic and messy, too annoying to read, too unrewarding, or confusing. The book isn’t formless. I feel like it has a pretty clear propulsion through. I want to have something like a plot, I’m not snobbish about that. But there were just various things I wanted to do. I wanted demons to go to a bank and negotiate, and get into a magical-economic-banking versus demonic-world duel, because I just thought that was funny, and true in a weird way. So that had to go in the book. I needed a way to bring all these elements together into something that wouldn’t just seem like a pile of stuff, where they would resonate meaningfully next to each other. That all sounds very abstract, but it’s not when you do it. You’re just tacking toward whatever is good, and you’re saying, “Can I steer these together and have them in the same place, at the same time?” And when it works, then it starts to produce yet more ideas… I can’t really point to a moment where I said, “I think Chalo is a yak sometimes.” It was just… I like yaks. They have a funny name, but they’re huge, dramatic animals. And then thinking about the rut and what it’s like to have a mating season, where you’re only sexual for a chunk of time each year – what’s that like? How do you know it’s starting? And if you’re a male, then you would perceive this as a desire to start randomly picking fights and clobbering other males… It’s innately funny to me, but there’s a pathos to it too, because they’re beasts, and they can’t help it. You can imagine a philosophically resigned yak: “Here we go again.” And that affords you opportunities for reflecting on all sorts of things that we as humans are compelled to do, where we say, “Here we go again…”"