Book Review: The Haunted Book

Jeremy Dyson comes steeped with credibility as the co-creator of the comically dark television series, The League of Gentlemen.

The Haunted Book traverses many different styles of the ghost story genre. This is achieved within an elaborately conceived and well-executed structure. The book commences as a modern journalistic examination by the author of a number of examples of paranormal experiences at the request of a small-town journalist, Aiden Fox. Fox has collected reports the incidents from various media including newspapers and internet sites. The author visits the relevant localities; draws on the available information and provides his report.

The early stories draw upon the meme that strange events are not only reported as occurring in the dim, dark past. The stories are set post 2000, in some cases, within a year or two of the publication date. Mobile phones take their place in the narrative. The author, by way of full disclosure, at first, sheepishly reports his own feelings of trepidation. He reports his own sighting, in the grounds of a partially redeveloped mental hospital, of a child wearing light clothing with hair across its face. The sighting filled Dyson with dread and caused him to flee the locale.

Older stylistic examples of the genre are then made possible by a series of recursions that would have done Douglas Hofstadter proud. Unexpectedly, as Dyson investigates the next incident, a book is handed to him. The stories that form the contents of that book (also called The Haunted Book) become the contents of our haunted book.

Each recursion is journalistic in tone and each ghost story is a reporting of a personal reminiscence received and told to the reader, both in good faith and without judgment. Like Dyson, the subsequent authors have had their own (partially sceptical) brush with the paranormal. The theme of the child figure with hair across its face is repeated a number of times.

The stories are compelling. The settings change. The paranormal experience changes. The characters who experience the hauntings each have aspects of their personality and experience that might make them vulnerable to self-deception. Lack of sociability; conflict with a parent; strange close knit family relationships; various types of sexual attitudes and conduct and susceptibility to guilt play their part.

This reinforces the impression of the calm objective reporting. It is as if the narrator is always being fair, not leaving out anything that might be seized upon by either sceptic or believer.

The original informant and ideas man, Aiden Fox, seems to haunt the narrative as the respective authors of the books within a book within a book are homonyms of his name. He is indeed a shadowy informant.

Dyson pulls it off. He proves a master of each ghost story type he chooses to tell. Each variation of the genre is told in its appropriate style without losing rhythm, interest or level of menace and intrigue. Numerous cultural traditions and arcane sources of knowledge are utilised without pretension. The resort to obscure learning never appears forced.

Invention is used again to resolve the recursion which has occurred. The real Jeremy Dyson and the real Aiden Fox are not forced to reappear.

The black pages at the end turn the focus to the relationship between book, narrative and reader. The ending is not out of place in a book about the paranormal and, for this reader, at least, it works.

Stephen Keim

Clayfield

19 December 2012