Don’t be fooled by the cover of Steve Nallon’s Ghost Stories, which illustrates the actor, impressionist and now author sitting in front of a roaring fire, with a cat on his lap and a big smile on his face. Beneath that surface, as you’ll find out in this collection of tales, is a mind that inhabits the catacombs of hell.
The stories in this book vary from the traditional to the outright weird. We get the ghost of Kenneth Williams talking about Hattie Jacques, and along the way, we learn much more about such Carry On films. In The Return of the Handbag, we get Margaret Thatcher telling us about her life as a ghost inside No. 10.
More disturbing is the revenge story It’s What She Would Have Wanted; through a series of emails, this shows how the interfering mother-in-law is finally bested. Other stories feature haunted objects like a theatre’s Ghost Light, where ghostly powers are observed to serve up poetic justice.
For the Hell of It is a gorier story that starts with a group of young people waking up on a beach. Everything seems normal until they find a human head and hand it over to a couple of police officers. Nothing is what it seems, and slowly it is revealed that this is a form of living hell.
Nallon uses a variety of different styles to narrate his stories, and for the Visiting Hattie story in the appendix, he provides a glossary of Polari words and expressions. In another appendix, he provides a guide to ghost tales in literature and a long list of films and television shows mentioned in the main text.
At the end of the book is a ghostly gallery of full-colour illustrations by Scott Brooker, one for each of the twelve stories. Our favourite is the illustration of the laughing policeman; it’s no laughing matter.
As you open these pages, enjoy Nallon’s talent for mixing humour and horror to titillate your senses.
