Price began working at a time when there was huge interest in spiritualism, fuelled in part by the terrible loss of life caused by the First World War. What is interesting too about Price is that he seemed to want to believe, if only he could find the genuine article in among the fraud and trickery, whereas other groups of researchers seemed to work from the assumption that everyone was genuine until shown to be otherwise.
On top of all this, there’s no denying that Harry Price was a fascinating character: like Harry Houdini, a debunker of mediums and others claiming to engage with the spirit world a skilled magician who used this knowledge to uncover others’ trickery. At which point the case became interesting all over again because, while I might not any longer believe unquestioningly in ghosts, I had become interested in why people did believe, and the lengths to which they would go to convince themselves and others of their existence. Later still, and by this time remotely unsurprised, I would find that Marianne Foyster, the focus of many of the later events, had also faked a lot of stuff. Later, older, wiser, much more sceptical, I would learn that it was probable that Price had faked some of the incidents himself. Good stuff for kids with a taste for the supernatural.
They were gripping stories, filled with ghostly nuns, ghostly carriages, and inexplicable phenomena, not to mention a lot of old-school hints on how one might set about investigating a haunting. And that interested me because, as a ten-year-old, I had avidly, read Price’s books about the haunting, both of them, several times. But having looked at the novel I was slightly surprised I hadn’t noticed it sooner, given its topic – Harry Price’s investigation of the haunting of Borley Rectory. This turned out to be because the novel had been adapted for tv, to be broadcast over Christmas.
The Ghost Hunters was published in 2013 but I had no idea it even existed until it began popping up all over my social media outlets a couple of weeks ago. And Neil Spring’s The Ghost Hunters turns out to be a novel that demands my attention. Have I learned nothing? Perhaps not, but one thing I’ve realised during my blogging hiatus is that sometimes one must bear witness to a book because it is bad. And now, as the year comes to a close, I’m once again about to write a review of a bad book.
As it turned out, I didn’t write a lot during the second half of 2015 anyway, and most of that was about theatrical productions. Also, I had begun to suspect myself of enjoying that kind of reviewing rather too much, not least because it is so easy to do, if not entirely rewarding (like the empty calories of sugar – a quick hit but not very sustaining). Earlier this year, I decided I was going to stop reviewing bad books on Paper Knife, because bad books are legion, and I could be doing something more constructive with my writing time.
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