Sean Martin's 3 favorite reads in 2024

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 Glass' is perhaps one of the finest stories in the book, a nightmarish portrayal of grief and guilt, while 'Behind You!' is unusual for being the only story in the book with no definite supernatural element, although the atmosphere is distinctly unsettling. ‘Fell Creatures’ has hints of Robert Aickman's 'The Inner Room' and M. R. Jame's 'The Haunted Dollhouse', but is arguably stranger than either.

‘The Ninth Curtain’ is the collection's most surreal story, about a man staying in a haunted - if that's the right word (and it may not be) pub. Indeed, only ‘From the Man-Seat’ could be regarded as anything like a conventional ghost story, in this case about a haunted dressing room in a clothes shop. Possibly best of all is ‘The Cardinal’s Ring’, a story about the final days of the composer - and murderer - Carol Gesualdo. Oliver again keeps the supernatural element to a minimum, but when he does introduce it, it is used beautifully. That might seem like an odd thing to say about a collection of weird and supernatural stories, but it is entirely fitting.

Oliver's writing style is polished, musical, discreet. There's not a weak story in the collection

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 Mound, written for Zealia Bishop in 1929-30.) What is perhaps less good about this edition is that it gives you no clue as to how much of HPL is in the revised/ghostwritten stories.

In the case of The Mound, he wrote the entire thing, based on a two-line plot germ provided by Bishop; in the case of, say, The Man of Stone, ghostwritten for Hazel Heald, it is less clear. Lovecraft perhaps wrote half of it. And in the case of The Night Ocean, he only apparently corrected Robert Barlow's prose. Still, I suppose these are minor gripes. I read this on my Kindle, as the physical edition has rather too-small type.

If you're new to Lovecraft, perhaps the three Penguin Classics are the ones to go for.

Jenn Ashworth's Ghosted is not what it seems. At first, it appears to be the story of a woman whose husband has walked out on her. Has he disappeared, or met with an accident? The real reason for his disappearance slowly becomes apparent, and the novel takes a decidedly dark direction. Ashworth very skilfully reveals what has actually happened to the narrator and her husband, but this is information she parcels out very slowly to the reader. This is an unsettling, even harrowing, study of grief and loss.