7 Books Like Ghosted

I first read H. P. Lovecraft as a teenager, and was immediately haunted by his work.

In particular, his use of landscape - the woods and hills of his native New England left an indelible impression on me. In stories like 'The Colour Out of Space' and 'The Dunwich Horror', the landscape is itself a character. Now that I am working on a Lovecraft-related project (a documentary film), I thought it was high time to reread him, and was struck by how good the stories are. In particular, early stories like 'From Beyond' and 'Facts Concerning the Late Arthur Jermyn and His Family' take nihilistic paranoia to the nth degree.

I found this Collected Fiction (published by Barnes and Noble) to be a good 'one stop shop' for Lovecraft, as it includes all his fiction, including the ghost written and collaborative work. (The best of these is the novella, The… show more.

The English writer Reggie Oliver is a modern master of the weird story.

This Haunted Heaven is his ninth collection of short stories, and it is perhaps his best since Holidays from Hell. His work could perhaps be characterised as being in the "traditional" vein of supernatural fiction, but that tradition would also include writers like Robert Aickman and Daphne Du Maurier.

Sometimes, there is no ghost in the accepted sense; sometimes, you are simply immersed into a world where something is not quite right, and you can't quite put your finger on why. The title story concerns a Cybele-worshipping cult in Crete; it is, amongst other things, a elegiac meditation on ageing. ‘Grey Glass’, ‘South Riding’, and ‘Behind You!’ are set in the world of the theatre.

A former actor himself, Reggie Oliver is in his element in these tales of ghostly occurrences in the world of greasepaint: 'Grey… show more.

First, because it’s incredibly funny. Geoff Dyer set out—he says—to write a sober, serious study of D. H. Lawrence, but life, travel arrangements, random people and his own inertia kept getting in the way. The story of his odyssey doesn’t just evoke all the things about writing that we’ve always suspected (that it’s hard; that it’s easy; that we often wonder why on earth we do it; that we never question that we want to do it). It also, by stealth, evokes and explains an amazing amount about Lawrence, and why he’s a writer that so many people love—or hate—so passionately. 

This was the book that had just sold to great acclaim when my own book was looking for a publisher. Like almost all of us, Stevens was desperate for peace, quiet and freedom from distractions so she could write her first novel. But she went further than most of us would dare: an uninhabited island off the Falklands. Yet on Bleaker Island every forward move she tried to make with the novel got tangled up in the impossibility of avoiding her self, her past, and how she got here. Writing does that—and it’s often also absurd, as Stevens knows too. I loved this book.

“What’s wrong with fiction, my best, most precious thing? What’s wrong with me?” asks novelist Jenn Ashworth. She set out on writing her fifth novel, then abruptly, excruciatingly, extendedly, found she couldn’t. Instead, in a broken and braided narrative which I found un-putdownable, she digs into the nightmares and strange waking states that PTSD and psychosis left her in, the stuffs and dreams of reading, writing and watching movies, and the painfully live legacies of a childhood caught between a violent father and an embattled religion. Writing is my best, most precious thing too: this is a disturbing, often bleakly comic and heartbreaking account of how illness and madness can be both the ruin and the making of art and an artist.

After eight successful books, Marie Chaix was abruptly dropped by her publisher. An editor-in-chief of another publisher picked her up, helped her dust herself down, became her writing support, friend and best reader, and published her next book. Three months later, he went to bed and never woke up. Shattered, Chaix decided that she couldn’t—wouldn’t—just didn’t write, not for thirteen years. In finally breaking her silence, Chaix draws a strange, delicate self-portrait of a writer paradoxically both stubborn and profoundly unconfident. I’m not Chaix, and I don’t always like autofiction, but as she weaves in and around the causes and consequences of her decision, her story seems to be about all writers.

Anyone who’s looking to establish a daily creative practice would be well advised to read this book and put the beautiful ideas inside into practice.

It’s packed with 12 weeks' worth of ideas for bringing out your artistic side. The ideas can help with any type of creative endeavour and are sure to encourage those creative juices to flow!