When I was growing up in Scotland I read the boys’ magazines like the Eagle and Dandy, and, of course, the comic books. In the post war austerity of the time the British comic books were in black and white, with colour only on the covers. Every now and then, though, a tubular package would arrive in the mail wrapped in brown paper—a roll of old comic books from a friend of my parents in Canada, Scottish expatriates living in Toronto. These comics were in full colour throughout and covered the usual fare of superheroes and funnies—but once there was a horrific cover featuring a ghoul rising from a fresh grave. It was ‘Tales from the Crypt’ and it had a different emotional feel to it, my first inkling that there was a genre called ‘horror’.

            I don’t write horror, but when you write ghost stories you sometimes find yourself skirting the edges of something altogether different. In preparation for Requiem for Mary Mac, I had to research a practice common in the early years of The Twentieth Century. Itinerant photographers would offer to take pictures of the recently deceased as mementoes. Often parents would pose with a child they had lost to a disease like the flu or polio. Reluctantly fascinated, I found myself looking at a dozen of these heirlooms.

            In order to create the illusion of life, the eyes of the deceased were open. I won’t go into how that was accomplished. One image in particular left me feeling faintly queasy. There were the parents, solemn and trying not to move—because the exposure times were quite long back then. Between them was a grown daughter of perhaps eighteen who would never be any older.    What got me, what made me ponder the notion of horror, was that it’s hard to remain perfectly still while an earnest photographer is holding up his hand. The two world weary parents were very slightly out of focus.

            The late daughter, posed on a chair, wasn’t. 

            She was in the sharp focus of the dead. Unwittingly, the poor parents—I can scarcely imagine a greater emotional pain—had been trying to capture a fleeting moment of their daughter as though alive and still with them. Instead they had commissioned a graphic expression of lifelessness. 

            The best ghost stories, at least now and then, are creepy. They make you feel odd as though you were intuiting the veil between life and death. For me it’s almost an intellectual pleasure, weaving words until the dead communicating with the living seems possible and maybe even something to wish for. This can make for a great story, the way a ruthless murder can be the basis of a good mystery. 

            I remember the pleasure I took in reading those comics from Canada; there was plenty of violence and skullduggery in their polychrome pages, but I didn’t lose any sleep over them. I didn’t lie awake at night staring at the ceiling trying not to think about them.  I also remember the one coloured comic that I warily set aside and never read again.