Plumbing the mysteries of poltergeists

This is a paranormal book — by which I mean it exists in a truly out of the ordinary netherworld of amiable smut and arch silliness not normally associated with titles reviewed in these pages. But hold on, there is a point — which I’ll come to later.‘Perhaps Wakdjunkaga was really Gef the Talking Mongoose.’ I read this amazing sentence and was about to throw the book across the room, but then realised that a flying paperback might, if S.D. Tucker were to see it, be interpreted as evidence for the existence of poltergeists (from the German for ‘noisy spirit’).

So I read on resignedly until my wife interrupted me and said: ‘That looks self-published.’ She is a designer. ‘One thing I’d recommend to any publisher is, if using black and white photography, always choose a high contrast image,’ she continued, thoughtfully flicking through the pages. The repro in Blithe Spirits makes everyone look like a grey lady.

With an energy as irrepressible as the most violent and noisy haunting, Tucker, who lives in Widnes and has something of
a fixation with excrement (an entire chapter is dedicated to ‘Toilet Humour’), rambles on and on. There is as little evidence of his book being either designed or edited as there is of the haunting of Epworth Rectory — where the bored Methodist Wesley family attributed the creaking of an old building to ghostly presences. Indeed, Tucker brings the concept of ‘lazy repetition’ into disrepute. ‘We have already mentioned Janet shitting in the sink in Enfield,’ he writes. Too true. Janet’s undisciplined defecation is a memorable leitmotif. Blithe Spirits really is an astonishingly bad book, and therefore extremely entertaining.

We learn, for example, that while the science of Newton and Einstein is taught at Stanford, Cambridge and Munich,
poltergeists are best studied in Enfield, Pontefract and Thornton Heath — or the factory in Gateshead, where horny-handed Geordies were frightened by loos which flushed uncommanded.