The Ghost Hunters by Neil Spring
Published by Quercus, October 2013
ISBN: 978-1780879758
416 pages
Review by Mark Yon
Regular visitors to these reviews at SFFWorld will know that I have a lot of fun choosing what to read at Hallowe’en each year, whether it be something old or something new.
This year’s read was not what I was expecting to read. But it was great fun.
The Ghost Hunters’ first main fiction is that it is a manuscript, supposedly found in 1977, left in a long-forgotten (by most) research library as part of a job lot, relics of an earlier age. It is the story of Sarah Gray, who in this fiction in 1926 unexpectedly found herself taking on the appointment of assistant to Harry Price, at the time Britain’s most famous ‘ghost-hunter’.
Sarah is a young twenty-something, keen to show the world what she can do and also further science by assisting Mr Price in his exploration of the supernatural. Harry seems determined to show the world that most ‘mediums’ are charlatans and fakers and has set up a science laboratory in London to test them. Sarah finds herself increasingly involved in such activities as well as being attracted to the charismatic, yet odd, Price.
Soon after taking on the position, Sarah finds herself and Harry involved in the case of Borley Rectory, a Victorian mansion reputedly ‘the most haunted house in England’. Harry sees it as an attempt to refute the ideas of ghosts once and for all. What happens when he and Sarah go to Borley to investigate and what happens afterwards is what takes up most of the rest of the book.
I enjoyed this a lot, and most of all its mixing of reality with fiction. When I was a youngster and reading as much as I could about haunted houses, Borley was one of my favourites. Clearly Neil has done his research. I recognise many of the details here, even though I first read of them thirty-odd years ago. Harry Price was a real person, as was his reputation. Borley Rectory was real. To this Neil has mixed in real people (Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, a real-life believer in spiritualism, Daily Mirror newspaper reporter Vernon Wall) with the fictional. There are references to real newspapers, signed documents and ephemera of the time, which give what could be seen as a far-fetched tale a semblance of authenticity. Neil does explain at the end what is ‘real’ and what is fiction at the end of the book for readers still not sure.
To add to this apparent realism, there’s an engaging, if tricky, balance throughout the book between the scientific rational and the supernatural irrational. There’s a touch of Richard Matheson’s Hell House here, with its attempts to science-ify the supernatural, and at the same time a nicely old-fashioned M R James feel to a tale of academic research, strange relics and strange happenings.
On the whole, The Ghost Hunters works fairly well, though there are odd lapses. Most disconcerting for me was the occasional steering into contemporary vocabulary – the use of the term ‘video camera’ for 1926 (when ‘film camera’ would have been better, perhaps?) and the securing of Borley Rectory being referred to as a ‘lockdown’, both of which threatened to take me out of the fictional environment so carefully created otherwise; but on the whole, the world of 1926 or so is both well done and generally otherwise suitably appropriate for its time.
With such a lengthy set-up and display, there is a risk that it all falls apart at the end. (It’s happened to me in such books many times before.) This doesn’t quite happen here, although there is a reveal towards the end which I think some readers will like, whilst others will consider to be rather too much of a coincidence. On the whole I thought that it was OK.
In summary, this is a good ghost story novel, done ‘the old fashioned way’ and with enough real references to make you think that this fiction might just be true. It was a great Halloween read, and I’m pleased to say one that didn’t let me down.
Mark Yon, October/November 2013
