The paranormal

Mark Z. Danielewski is best known for his House of Leaves, a typographically delirious horror novel about a manuscript written by a blind man describing a film which showed an impossible house. It seemed to exhaust a particular kind of postmodernism of footnotes, cryptography, metatexts, pop culture and more, yet remained at heart a story about grief. Tom’s Crossing is more immediately accessible, but it is every bit as clever and even more emotionally devastating. The bulk of the action takes place over five days running up to Halloween in 1982, although with a preface, ‘Some of what happened before’, and a longer epilogue, ‘Some of what happened after’. The

It comes as a surprise for anyone assuming that ghosthunters are easily fooled scaredy cats to learn that there was once a Society for Psychical Research based at Cambridge University. Undergraduate members would gather on Sunday evenings to hear the latest reports of investigations into supernatural phenomena. It sounds quaint; but to judge from Ben Machell’s account of the group’s charismatic leader Tony Cornell, there must have been many enthralling moments. Machell uses the figure of Cornell to prise open the SPR, founded in 1882 in London. Members included Arthur Balfour, William Gladstone and Arthur Conan Doyle. Cornell became a member after encountering a hermit in India when on active

NVK, which is the IATA (International Air Transport Association) code for Narvik’s old airport, is in this instance Naemi Vieno Kuusela, a Finnish femme fatale whom we first meet in this novel in North Karelia in 1579 and later in the company of Zhang Guo Xing, a wealthy Chinese businessman, in a Shanghai nightclub in 2012. This surely offers a clue about her. But, as she says on page 118: You think you know what I am. You have no idea. I’m not in any of your books. You try to catch me. Your hands grasp empty air. I’m not a story you can tell. That doesn’t sound like a

This is a paranormal book — by which I mean it exists in a truly out of the ordinary netherworld of amiable smut and arch silliness not normally associated with titles reviewed in these pages. But hold on, there is a point — which I’ll come to later.‘Perhaps Wakdjunkaga was really Gef the Talking Mongoose.’ I read this amazing sentence and was about to throw the book across the room, but then realised that a flying paperback might, if S.D. Tucker were to see it, be interpreted as evidence for the existence of poltergeists (from the German for ‘noisy spirit’). So I read on resignedly until my wife interrupted me