How to See Ghosts (or Surely Bring Them To You)
“This part of the book is for children who were born in the morning or around lunchtime. If you were born at midnight – some say just at twilight – you were probably born with the gift of being able to see ghosts and other spirits and don’t have to be told how.”
Back at the tail end of September, I posted a bit about what my October was going to be like. As part of that post, I linked to some of the stories I have available to read online that are set on or around Halloween, but I somehow forgot the most recent one.
How to See Ghosts & Other Figments is my latest single-author collection. Like all of my collections, it is, I think and hope, a series of fun, spooky stories. But also, more so than maybe any of my other collections, it is a book about longing. Because I think, for many of us who stare into the dark, there is as much longing there as fear.
Nowhere is that more true than in the title story, which borrows its moniker from a Vincent Price-narrated audiobook of ghost stories and other spooky stuff which, in turn, got its name from a book of poetry by Leah Bodine Drake, published by Arkham House in 1950. “How to See Ghosts (or Surely Bring Them to You)” may be the only published story I have ever written that doesn’t contain a speculative element.
It is, instead, about four friends who go to a haunted house (modeled on the real-life haunted houses that occupy the West Bottoms here in Kansas City) and, from there, a hotel room with an attached ghost story (modeled on the Muehlebach Hotel, here in Kansas City) where they have a seance. It is a story about unrequited love, about the chains we forge ourselves, and about wanting so badly for there to be something magical in the world, even and maybe especially if it is also terrible.
It’s also one of two stories original to How to See Ghosts that is set explicitly on Halloween, and deals directly with Halloween haunted houses. The other is “Old Haunts,” which is the one I forgot to include in my earlier roundup. A more traditional horror story about an aficionado of Halloween haunts who gets more than he bargained for in a run-down home haunt, “Old Haunts” was presented in audio form by Pseudopod last year, one of a long list of times that they have put out one of my weird tales.
There are several other pieces in How to See Ghosts that, while not explicitely set on Halloween, are probably pretty perfect spooky-season reading. “Masks” is a fragmentary little number about the shadow of old Hollywood. “Doctor Pitt’s Menagerie” features an attraction of sorts that shares a lot of DNA with a Halloween haunt, even while it is ultimately something very different. Even stories like “Prehistoric Animals” or “The Drunkard’s Dream” have Halloween-y moments – and they’re both pieces I’m very proud of.
I’m proud of How to See Ghosts overall, even while I think it has made the smallest splash of any of my collections so far. It’s perhaps the most mixed of them, the themes that tie the stories together less obvious at a glance. But they are there. Releasing the book in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic probably didn’t help, either.
If you’re looking for something to read this spooky season, why not give “Old Haunts” up there a try. If you like it, maybe pick up How to See Ghosts from Word Horde. Who knows… maybe you’ll even see one?
“Just say you aren’t scared. Just say how brave and nonchalant you’d be if you ever saw a ghost, and see what happens.”
