The Good Unknown and Other Ghost Stories

Stephen Volk
Tartarus Press

In this new collection of eleven stories, Stephen Volk explores the wide span of possibilities of the ghost story in its various manifestations — from hauntings set in the quotidian modern world, to ones that hark back to traditional, but no less chilling, tales of the past.
When battle-scarred army veterans are recruited for an archaeological dig in Wiltshire, more than bones are unearthed, in ‘Unrecovered’. A pleasure park becomes anything but pleasurable in ‘Three Fingers, One Thumb’. In ‘31/10’ a notorious, fateful BBC TV studio is revisited, while in ‘The Waiting Room’ a supernatural encounter makes Charles Dickens himself come to question both his creative inspiration and his fundamental beliefs.
Three brand new stories are included here: ‘The Crossing’, ‘Baby on Board’, and ‘Lost Loved Ones’ — the latter novella being a sequel to Volk’s television series Afterlife and a welcome return for him to the much-loved character of Alison Mundy, the troubled psychic medium, in a world post-Covid.

Novelist and screenwriter Stephen Volk has an impressive pedigree of dark delights to his name but is perhaps best remembered for scripting the BBC 'documentary', 'Ghostwatch', although in the pages of Wyrd Britain he's praised for penning the very excellent 'I'll Be Watching You' for the BBC anthology series 'Ghosts'.

This collection from Tartarus Press presents eleven stories that deal, for the most part, with aftermaths; of death, of loss, of pride, of violence, of betrayal.  Along with two visits to previous work - the aforementioned 'Ghostwatch' and his ITV series 'Afterlife', Volk provides a delicately balanced selection of stories. They are at their best when most grounded - the title story, the Jamesian 'Cold Aston', the poignant 'Baby on Board', or the book's opening story 'Uncovered' - but Volk is a dab hand at his screenwriting game and knows the joy of a good pulpy romp with his return to old haunts 'Lost Loved Ones' resurrecting 'Afterlife' some 20 years after the show apeared on TV, would be a welcome addendum for fans, and an enjoyably energetic read for those of us who missed out through not having a TV at that time..

One can always rely on the good folks at Tartarus to provide an unusual and entertaining read and this definitely proved to be so. Going into this I only knew Volk for his TV work and so was hoping for good things but not really knowing whether his screenwriting skills would translate into prose, but I shouldn't have worried as he has a striking imagination and a prepossessing style and as I've since discovered he has a number of books to his name, I'm retroactively unsurprised at how much I enjoyed this collection. ..........................................................................................

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