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The Haunted Book

3.88 of 5 stars 3.88 · rating details · 88 ratings · 23 reviews

· What unspeakable horror glimpsed in the basement of a private library in West Yorkshire drove a man to madness and an early grave?

· What led to an underground echo chamber in a Manchester recording studio being sealed up for good?

· What creature walks the endless sands of Lancashire's Fleetwood Bay, and what connects it to an unmanned craft washed ashore in Port Elizabet...more

Hardcover, 352 pages

Published November 1st 2012 by Canongate Books (first published October 29th 2012)

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Apr 24, 2013 Kirsty rated it 1 of 5 stars

Shelves: free-amazon-vine-books, wtf-was-this, never-read-again

I have read many supernatural stories of both the fact and fiction variety since I was a child, but The Haunted Book easily ranks as the worst.

Instead of chilling, gothic style stories woven into a tense plot, you get a ridiculous collection of insipid, pointless amateur rubbish. The stories are in no way scary, and I do believe I have read children's books that were more frightening (and made much more sense)!

The flow was very stilted and jarring, without any definate aim or direction. When it...more

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Nov 17, 2012 Patrick rated it 5 of 5 stars

I enjoy a good ghost story. Or perhaps ‘enjoy’ is the wrong word, since I’m both more and less demanding of them than I would be of literary fiction. I go to them for total involvement, and to some extent I’m willing to set aside my usual critical faculties in pursuit of that. I've always had this fantasy of finding some obscure volume of occult writing and being affected by it to the point of genuine existential terror – hence my love of Mark Danielewski’s cult classic ‘House of Leaves’, for ex...more I enjoy a good ghost story. Or perhaps ‘enjoy’ is the wrong word, since I’m both more and less demanding of them than I would be of literary fiction. I go to them for total involvement, and to some extent I’m willing to set aside my usual critical faculties in pursuit of that. I've always had this fantasy of finding some obscure volume of occult writing and being affected by it to the point of genuine existential terror – hence my love of Mark Danielewski’s cult classic ‘House of Leaves’, for example.

‘The Haunted Book’ isn’t the first collection to adopt a frame narrative that masquerades as a series of true accounts, but it’s refreshing to find something which adopts the conventions of horror fiction even while manipulating them to suit its own ends. It’s interesting, and very well written; and yes, it is haunting in more than one sense.

An introduction by the author frames the book as a collaboration with a journalist named Aiden Fox, who writes columns on supernatural occurrences for a local paper in the south-west of England. Fox himself doesn’t appear in the stories which follow, but each one is preceded by a link from a narrator (apparently Dyson himself) who travels directly to the site at which each story occurs. He even goes so far as to give road directions as to how to get to most of the locations yourself, should you be interested.

The stories themselves are genuinely inspired. I don’t want to go into detail as to what they’re about because much of the pleasure I found in this book was in discovering each one on its own merits. Dyson has clearly read widely in the traditions of British horror fiction, and he really does know his stuff. For the most part his tales eschew gore and violence in favour of atmosphere, yet they aren’t leaden or overtly threatening; they lure you in, keep you wondering exactly when and how the shock will come until sometimes it doesn’t come at all. Or sometimes it does. Some don’t even really feature anything explicitly paranormal, but a deep vein of weirdness runs through every one.

And then something else unexpected happens. About three-fifths of the way through the book, the author does something unusual with the form of the text which colours what follows. Again, I don’t want to say too much about this except that one of the later stories relies upon the narrative gear-shift in order to deliver an incredibly clever twist in its tail. That aside, it wasn’t ever entirely clear to me what purpose the change in narrative style was meant to achieve. Was it simply another way of forestalling what would normally be a ‘big reveal’ about the true nature of Dyson’s apparently non-fictional persona?

I don’t know. And that might turn out to be the most interesting thing about this book. The ending itself is one of the strangest I’ve read in any work of fiction for some time; on one level it colours what came before in the light of new knowledge, but it still withholds revelation. Certain themes, things the stories have in common are underlined, but it frustrates any attempt to link them all together in any kind of grand conspiracy. The question of where all these stories came from – which in a way is the main question of the book -- is left unanswered. And when you think about it, isn’t that a really weird demand to make from a work of fiction in the first place?

(One final thing: if you’re thinking of buying this book, get it in hard copy rather than as an ebook. You won’t be sorry.)

[EDIT 27/2/13: Upgraded this to five stars because I'm still thinking about most of these stories over three months later.](less)

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Oct 28, 2012 Ellie rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: ghosts, horror

When Jeremy Dyson is contacted by journalist Aiden Fox to uncover Britain’s hidden ghost stories, he embarks a hardened sceptic. As he sets off around the country he learns how the mundane can turn terrifying in an instant.

The success of many of these stories is the complete normality running up to the ghost encounter. One minute you’re reading about the minutiae of everyday lives and the next an edge of fear has crept into the text. The fear that a noise or a touch can bring is somehow much mor...more

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Jan 21, 2013 Nay rated it 4 of 5 stars

Well, I'm not really sure what to make of this book. It starts off with an introduction by the author, Dyson, explaining his history with ghost stories and how he came to write this book. He then lays out some stories for our perusal, giving an account of his experiences when visiting the setting of each one. The book then takes a different turn by becoming another book of a similar name, again recounting some ghostly stories. And so on. I'm not even sure I fully understand the last few pages, s...more

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Dec 11, 2012 D.M. rated it 4 of 5 stars

I've only read one other book by Dyson, but it was good enough for me to want to check this one out when it appeared (credit again to my library, who actually ordered it new when I asked for it!). Coincidentally, I've been reading a collection of M.R. James' ghost stories, and this fits in perfectly with that. In fact, many times I forgot what was going on in which book, they're so similar in tone, topic and style.
Dyson's writing is perfect. When I read the previous book (Cranes...), I was struc...more

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Jan 14, 2013 Phil rated it 4 of 5 stars

*Spoiler alert. I loved this book. The tale about the mental institution, forget the title, was particularly chilling, like being stuck inside a nightmarish public information film from the 1970s. My only gripe is that the back story, about the author's collaboration with a reporter, seemed to fragment and eventually disintegrate entirely - what happened? I expected there to be some kind of resolution but none was forthcoming. Having said that, it's still a fantastic read. The Aickman influence,...more

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Mar 05, 2013 Phil rated it 1 of 5 stars

Shelves: fiction, paranormal, not-finished

Preposterous tosh. There I was expecting this book to be full of chills yet the stories are about as scary as an episode of Scooby Doo. This is one book that does not seem to know what it is, and you are left with the feeling that the author is trying to be too clever for his own good. The writing style is actually quite good, however, there are countless spelling mistakes and even missing words, so whoever proof read this didn’t do a very good job. These are supposed to be fiction stories based...more

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Jan 26, 2013 Virginia Appleton rated it 5 of 5 stars

Only just started this but loving every second so far. Bloody brilliant!

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Feb 28, 2013 Anthony rated it 4 of 5 stars

This book delivered more than I had expected. It presents itself as a portmanteau connecting stories based around the frame of Dyson collaborating with a local journalist to assemble his spooky column into a book.

It's quite an effective conceit. The idea of ready recorded stories needing to be qualified by a journey around haunted Britain is a mouth watering prospect. The only problem is the framing device disappears halfway through the book and is never really explained.

Not that it mattered m...more

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Jan 14, 2013 Joanne Sheppard rated it 4 of 5 stars

Jeremy Dyson is the member of The League of Gentlemen team who doesn’t appear on screen. He’s also the co-writer of the stage hit Ghost Stories, a deeply unsettling play in the ‘portmanteau’ format beloved of British horror films of the 1960s and 70s, in which several separate stories are told within a overarching narrative. Like his fellow Gentlemen Reece Shearsmith and Mark Gatiss, Dyson seems to have a frame of horror interest that’s incredibly similar to my own, heavily influenced by pre-197...more Jeremy Dyson is the member of The League of Gentlemen team who doesn’t appear on screen. He’s also the co-writer of the stage hit Ghost Stories, a deeply unsettling play in the ‘portmanteau’ format beloved of British horror films of the 1960s and 70s, in which several separate stories are told within a overarching narrative. Like his fellow Gentlemen Reece Shearsmith and Mark Gatiss, Dyson seems to have a frame of horror interest that’s incredibly similar to my own, heavily influenced by pre-1975 films, short story anthologies and slightly cheaply-produced books called things like ‘The Hamlyn Book of Ghosts’. If he’s got a pack of vintage Horror Top Trumps knocking around, used to collect Armada Ghost Books, always chose the Dracula ice lolly and got Shiver & Shake annual for Christmas every year, he’s probably just me in a parallel universe in which I am inexplicably a successful northern writer.

The Haunted Book, then – also in the ‘portmanteau’ format, and presented as a work of non-fiction in which Dyson is commissioned by the mysterious Aiden Fox to compile a collection of mostly contemporary British ghost stories – should by rights have been the perfect read for me. And, as I would have expected, a lot of it did certainly resonate with me.

Each story-within-the-story (and there are many) is a gem. Some of them are ghost stories in the conventional sense. A man is haunted by a ghostly voice from a disconnected phone, for instance, and an evil spirit stalks an old library. Some of them, however, are something different, and ultimately more unsettling: the one that has continued to nag at my subconscious since I finished the book over a week ago features no actual ‘ghosts’ at all, but rather a family trying to find an abandoned amusement park they once visited but have never been able to locate again. It’s a story where what remains unsaid and unexplained is more disturbing than what is. And most – perhaps all – the stories have a strong psychological undercurrent that suggests that what we’re really frightened of most of all is ourselves.

There’s more to The Haunted Book than just a collection of stories. However, it’s almost impossible to go into much detail about what is arguably the most interesting aspect of the book without giving away the end, and the experience of reading it does rely somewhat on that end coming as a surprise. It’s probably enough to say that the title of the book is no accident, as Dyson (in his fictional guise as the protagonist, at least) discovers books within books within books, all written by authors with curiously significant names. Those who went to see Ghost Stories may remember what happens to Dr Goodman, the rationalist sceptic and professor of parapsychology (played by Andy Nyman in the production I saw) who tells the stories themselves, and also the degree to which the audience were drawn into the production. Perhaps elements of The Haunted Book will come as less of a surprise to them.

Without giving any further explanation, I’ll just say that while the end of The Haunted Book is undeniably a clever one that elevates the book above a straightforward ghost story collection, I also found its high-concept artifice a little distancing. The element of the novel that’s supposed to really draw the reader in was, for me, the very thing that made me feel as if I was taking a step back and losing contact with the chilling undercurrent of the book overall. Perhaps the fault lies with me, and I was too busy looking out for it, too keen to analyse. But all that said, I can’t help but admire the way Dyson brings the novel together at its conclusion for its sheer ingenuity. It's an ending that will stay with me for some time, and I suspect it will stand up to repeated re-readings.

If you have even the slightest interest in ghost stories, I'd recommend The Haunted Book. And if you’ve read it, do let me know what you think.
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Jan 26, 2013 Tiddleydwarf rated it 2 of 5 stars

This wasn,t what i expected it to be. Being a fan of Ghost Stories and League of Gentleman. Its not a typical book of ghost stories. I,d say the tales within were very freudian. They seem to centre around self doubt and human frailty. I suppose this book is all about what you expect and i just wanted bog standard ghost stories but this goes a bit deeper than this. Much is made of the ending, not really a twist but very tongue in cheek and unexpected. I only really got it after putting the book d...more

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Nov 02, 2012 Lou rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: arc, horror, supernatural

Eye-catching hardback edition that if your to judge a book by it's cover it would call you to its dark passages in the boundaries between natural and supernatural.
There is a motley of stories contained within, ordinary people in ordinary places new dwellings, hospitals, and the sea to name a few, but
what they encounter is of the supernatural and unexplained terrors.
This did serve up some interesting reading into strange occurrences, there was a feeling for me that this territory that i treaded...more

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Jan 06, 2013 Sean rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: horror

This review has been hidden because it contains spoilers. To view it, click here.

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Dec 11, 2012 Janette Fleming rated it 4 of 5 stars

What unspeakable horror glimpsed in the basement of a private library in West Yorkshire drove a man to madness and an early grave?

What led to an underground echo chamber in a Manchester recording studio being sealed up for good?

What creature walks the endless sands of Lancashire's Fleetwood Bay, and what connects it to an unmanned craft washed ashore in Port Elizabeth, nearly six thousand miles away?

In 2009 Jeremy Dyson was contacted by a journalist wanting help bringing together accounts of tru...more What unspeakable horror glimpsed in the basement of a private library in West Yorkshire drove a man to madness and an early grave?

What led to an underground echo chamber in a Manchester recording studio being sealed up for good?

What creature walks the endless sands of Lancashire's Fleetwood Bay, and what connects it to an unmanned craft washed ashore in Port Elizabeth, nearly six thousand miles away?

In 2009 Jeremy Dyson was contacted by a journalist wanting help bringing together accounts of true life ghost stories from across the British Isles.

The Haunted Book chronicles the journey Dyson, formerly a hardened sceptic, went on to uncover the truth behind these tales.

Love this review from the Independent http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-ent...

It's traditional to present ghost stories with an authenticating framing device: the dusty diary, the old newspaper clipping, the aged man who relates a terrible experience.

The shtick here is that a journalist, Aiden Fox, who writes a column about true ghostly encounters, has proposed a collaboration to Jeremy Dyson, the co-creator of The League of Gentlemen; he provides his extensive source material and Dyson will write up the stories as fiction. Dyson, or should that be "Dyson", accepts, and vows to visit all the locations. But that is just the start of the game.

The 10 stories which comprise The Haunted Book explore the conventions and tricks of the form, although some have no ghost at all. We begin with a straightforward haunted house yarn. A young man is taunted by calls from a disconnected telephone; but it seems that the clue lies in his own psychosexual make-up. The sense of a link between a character's sexual life and his supernatural experience intensifies as the book goes on, and is one of the unifying features of the collection. Another is the way that "Dyson" himself becomes a haunted figure, as he roams around the country following Fox's leads.

"A Wire with Gain" concerns the surviving (heh, heh, heh) members of an Eighties band, Zurau, who reunite to complete an album in the very studio where one of their number had a horrible experience. The recording terminology of the title becomes an elegant metaphor for time passing and opportunity lost.

After four tales, the book turns into a replica of a 1978 title, This Book is Haunted, within which lies perhaps the most terrifying tale, "Tetherdown Lock". The spirit of the writer Robert Aickman – much admired by Dyson – presides over all (one of Zurau's songs is named after an Aickman story). Aickman also ties sexuality and coercion in some of his creepiest tales. The last two formal tales, which purport to come from yet another source, "A Book of Hauntings", make this link explicit with a Leeds library haunted by a porn fiend, and a series of sex crimes out on't moors. But there's one more surprise for the reader, in the final, coal-black pages.

The Haunted Book sets out not merely to entertain, but to embody a creeping menace in the text itself. The trompe-l'oeil cover is just the start of the fun. Open it if you dare ….
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May 05, 2013 Blair rated it 3 of 5 stars

Shelves: 2012-release, ghostly-and-magical, short-stories, past-and-present

I read Jeremy Dyson's short story collection The Cranes That Build the Cranes at the end of last year and found it average, but I continued to be interested in his latest work The Haunted Book, partly because of its interesting premise. The idea is that the author of this book - supposedly the real Jeremy Dyson - has been sent a collection of strange true stories by a journalist named Aiden Fox. Dyson then travels around England to the various places these stories originated in order to investig...more

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Jan 31, 2013 John rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: mindfuck, to-re-read

Well, I won't spoil anything. I didn't really find many of the stories particularly scary, but I guess some of it was a little un-nerving. More in a sense of you don't really know where they're going to go.

Actually I will say this, about the fairground story: (view spoiler)...more

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Nov 18, 2012 Jake Grey rated it 4 of 5 stars

It isn't a straight forward ghost story. You are not going to be taken to some Scooby Doo mansion but you will be taken on a metaphorical journey which in itself is a clever conceit. You will be drawn into its windy road, getting more and more lost in the haunted mansion in your head and finally - and obviously I can't tell you how -- it will throw you out in a most unexpected way at the end. You will not predict this!

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Feb 15, 2013 Jackie marked it as to-read

I registered a book at BookCrossing.com!
http://www.BookCrossing.com/journal/11709060

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Dec 31, 2012 Rita rated it 5 of 5 stars

I registered a book at BookCrossing.com!
http://www.BookCrossing.com/journal/11614086

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Dec 03, 2012 Kim rated it 5 of 5 stars

Creepy, unnerving and thoroughly recommended if you want to scare the hell out of yourself!

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Feb 21, 2013 Yoshay L. Lindblom rated it 5 of 5 stars

This was one ride of a kind! Totally unpredictable and entirely nerve wracking! Really enjoyed it. oooooh it haunts me still! Recommend it to all lovers of dark fiction. Read it now!

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Apr 15, 2013 Andy Mcgrath rated it 3 of 5 stars

Interesting but not great. It seemed to me a bit like swapping tales over a camp fire instead of fear inducing rapture.

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May 21, 2013 Mich marked it as to-read

May 20, 2013 Alice rated it 3 of 5 stars

May 17, 2013 Rebecca marked it as to-read

May 17, 2013 Steven Pilling marked it as to-read

May 14, 2013 Chris Bailey added it

May 13, 2013 Clare marked it as to-read

May 12, 2013 Andrea marked it as to-read

Shelves: haunted, recommended-to-me

May 12, 2013 Victoria is currently reading it

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“Memory was a story you told yourself about yourself, extrapolated from a tiny dot-matrix of facts.” — 2 people liked it

“Everyone had an ulterior motive in his worldview. Everyone was self-serving and therefore a potential instrument of pain. The world was a lonely, awful, brutal, terrible place.” — 1 person liked it

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