After the Christmas ‘funny’ books, here’s an even larger pile of Christmas ‘quirky’ books.
After the Christmas ‘funny’ books, here’s an even larger pile of Christmas ‘quirky’ books. In practice, quirky books aren’t just for Christmas, they’re for the whole year round. But try telling a publisher that. Thousands of them have been pouring out this autumn, and in the pre-Christmas jungle good books will surely be lost, consumed by larger and nastier predators in a single contemptuous gulp.
In Ghoul Britannia (Short Books, £12.99), Andrew Martin muses on ‘a nation primed for ghostliness’. Our weather is just right, our landscape could have been designed for the purpose, and we have loads of rickety old houses that creak ominously in the middle of the night, even when they are not being burgled. I wouldn’t be surprised if more of us believe in ghosts than believe in God. Martin likes to sit with his friends in darkened Victorian boozers swapping ghost stories, and his great personal disappointment (verging on tragedy) is that he has never seen a ghost himself. Instead he holes up in the British Library and devours every known book on the subject, factual or fictional.
This slender volume, artfully structured and a pleasure to read, almost feels like an accidental by-product of this research. Martin is probably best known for his wonderfully atmospheric novels about Jim Stringer, railway detective, but his non- fiction has a wry, deadpan flavour of its own. He ends the book with a brand new ghost story that avoids all the clichés he has spent the previous 200 pages quietly debunking.
Complete and Utter Zebu by Simon Rose and Steve Caplin (Old Street Publishing, £8.99) is one of several books this year (and every year) to be fuelled by rage, frustration and disappointment.
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