The Good Unknown and other ghost stories
The Good Unknown
Stephen Volk
Tartarus Press
The ghosts are back. After many years of being diminished by shouty TV hosts, they have come back into the culture, as they wish and maybe need to do, surreptitiously, subtly, accusingly. I cannot help but notice how my students seize on the idea of ‘hauntology’ not to rush off to hold séances, but as a means to sift different shades of being, existing, becoming, ghosting in a digitally haunted landscape. Stephen Volk’s new collection of ghost stories is so timely, not only for its contribution to this cultural moment, but for the very particular invocation of empathy and a tangible being that he performs.
These are not those irritating ghosts who hide very little behind sheets of enigma; they are fleshy and right here, with us, touchable and needy and only rarely as terrifying as they are disturbingly appealing. The tales in Stephen Volk’s The Good Unknown bring their cool intimacies scarily close. Even when these ghosts manifest in media they are no longer those grisly demons sealed away in a ‘Glory Hole’ cupboard, they are the media got inside us: “the lip synch is going wrong in real life”. They manifest as an empty baby seat in the back of a Ford Focus, a smoothed stone on a famous beach, oil paint incapable of fading (the artist’s fear of being forever haunted by their work), and that ‘Studio One’ at the BBC that has been sealed up and must never be opened again.
Strikingly self-haunting is ‘The Waiting Room’ in which an increasingly unnerved Charles Dickens finds himself inside one of his own ghost stories; in a riveting and self-excoriating encounter of artist with their own work (every bit as good a self-examination as that of Truman Capote in Bennett Miller’s 2005 film or Stephen King’s of himself in ‘Misery’), the ghost is a lure, drawing its subjects out of accomplishment and the satisfying uncertainty of art onto a shiftiness that is elemental.
Halfway through these stories, I thought to myself something like ‘this is peak Stephen Volk, in a morass of phantasmagoric media entertainments he calls out the human’ – and the lurid tales here, ‘Three Fingers One Thumb’, ‘31/10’ and the chilly ‘Cold Ashton’ where “kindness can be a special kind of cruelty” are utterly compelling – but there is then something much more powerful and empathic to come. For the later tales of Volk’s collection, such as ‘The Crossing’ and ‘Lost Loved Ones’, pull us down deeper into an elliptical in-between of haunting and presence, where ghosts are most real, most searching, most demanding; warmly embracing the reader with the ambiguity of their shadowing and pursuing. A crash victim that will not go away, a young man haunted by an image off the news, painful family outings and the malign banter of hairdressers; in these later tales there is no easy escape from the realities of what seems unreal. Nor, in the warm-heartedness of such tales of clamminess and chill, do we ever want to escape.
Each of the eleven stories of The Good Unknown can stand up on its own; but together they add up to something more, to a different kind of telling of the ghost; for what is all the time engrossing in these stories is how we can never quite guess in what body or phantom the consciousness, feelings and thoughts of the story will settle. For by Volk’s craft, the story is the ghost, passing through walls, drifting down the shingle beach, floating in the waves, rising up in the dreams; not that annoying spectral thing that never explains itself, but instead a movement among things, a possessed volition, a curiosity without a will that hauls us in. Not by ethereal tricks, but by the abject hauntedness of lifeboats, police cars, blue and white striped tape and a vast cold sea, an otherness arrives demanding to be hugged.
Crab Man
Go here for all Crab Man / Mytho's other reviews
Stephen Volk
Tartarus Press
The ghosts are back. After many years of being diminished by shouty TV hosts, they have come back into the culture, as they wish and maybe need to do, surreptitiously, subtly, accusingly. I cannot help but notice how my students seize on the idea of ‘hauntology’ not to rush off to hold séances, but as a means to sift different shades of being, existing, becoming, ghosting in a digitally haunted landscape. Stephen Volk’s new collection of ghost stories is so timely, not only for its contribution to this cultural moment, but for the very particular invocation of empathy and a tangible being that he performs.
These are not those irritating ghosts who hide very little behind sheets of enigma; they are fleshy and right here, with us, touchable and needy and only rarely as terrifying as they are disturbingly appealing. The tales in Stephen Volk’s The Good Unknown bring their cool intimacies scarily close. Even when these ghosts manifest in media they are no longer those grisly demons sealed away in a ‘Glory Hole’ cupboard, they are the media got inside us: “the lip synch is going wrong in real life”. They manifest as an empty baby seat in the back of a Ford Focus, a smoothed stone on a famous beach, oil paint incapable of fading (the artist’s fear of being forever haunted by their work), and that ‘Studio One’ at the BBC that has been sealed up and must never be opened again.
Strikingly self-haunting is ‘The Waiting Room’ in which an increasingly unnerved Charles Dickens finds himself inside one of his own ghost stories; in a riveting and self-excoriating encounter of artist with their own work (every bit as good a self-examination as that of Truman Capote in Bennett Miller’s 2005 film or Stephen King’s of himself in ‘Misery’), the ghost is a lure, drawing its subjects out of accomplishment and the satisfying uncertainty of art onto a shiftiness that is elemental.
Halfway through these stories, I thought to myself something like ‘this is peak Stephen Volk, in a morass of phantasmagoric media entertainments he calls out the human’ – and the lurid tales here, ‘Three Fingers One Thumb’, ‘31/10’ and the chilly ‘Cold Ashton’ where “kindness can be a special kind of cruelty” are utterly compelling – but there is then something much more powerful and empathic to come. For the later tales of Volk’s collection, such as ‘The Crossing’ and ‘Lost Loved Ones’, pull us down deeper into an elliptical in-between of haunting and presence, where ghosts are most real, most searching, most demanding; warmly embracing the reader with the ambiguity of their shadowing and pursuing. A crash victim that will not go away, a young man haunted by an image off the news, painful family outings and the malign banter of hairdressers; in these later tales there is no easy escape from the realities of what seems unreal. Nor, in the warm-heartedness of such tales of clamminess and chill, do we ever want to escape.
Each of the eleven stories of The Good Unknown can stand up on its own; but together they add up to something more, to a different kind of telling of the ghost; for what is all the time engrossing in these stories is how we can never quite guess in what body or phantom the consciousness, feelings and thoughts of the story will settle. For by Volk’s craft, the story is the ghost, passing through walls, drifting down the shingle beach, floating in the waves, rising up in the dreams; not that annoying spectral thing that never explains itself, but instead a movement among things, a possessed volition, a curiosity without a will that hauls us in. Not by ethereal tricks, but by the abject hauntedness of lifeboats, police cars, blue and white striped tape and a vast cold sea, an otherness arrives demanding to be hugged.
Crab Man
Go here for all Crab Man / Mytho's other reviews