Galley Beggar Press‘Perhaps you don’t know how repulsive and loathsome is the ghost of a living man. The ghosts of the dead may be all right, but the ghost of mad Johnnie gave me the creeps…’
So speaks the narrator of Muriel Spark’s haunting tale, ‘The Leaf-sweeper’, before going on to recount the disturbing and mercilessly witty story of a certain ‘madman’, Johnnie Geddes – a man hell-bent on outlawing Christmas – who meets the most terrifying of all apparitions: himself.
Whilst the name Muriel Spark will be familiar to many a book worm I'd never read anything by her until relatively recently when I stumbled across 'The Comforters', a fabulously odd and witty piece of whimsy with one fleeting moment of unanticipated weirdness. This new chapbook from the good folks at Galley Beggar Press - part of their 'Pocket Ghosts' series along with Charles Dickens' 'The Signalman' and Elizabeth Gaskell's 'The Old Nurse's Story' - provides two haunted tales that hold much the same character as that novel.
The first story, and the one that gives the book it's title, is a Christmas ghost story without a death as a Xmas curmudgeon meets his own ghost. The second story, 'Another Pair of Hands', is a delightfully eccentric little tale with an enjoyably enigmatic core that could come with a variety of explanations, all equally engaging.
The two combine nicely and this lovely little pocket book proved the perfect companion for a coffee break on an autumnal walk.
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