Review: THE LAMP IN THE WINDOW by Tom Mead

Hands up, I hardly ever review books - probably for the same reason I didn't last long in the local book club. I like to read what I fancy reading (which is currently War and Peace and James Herbert's Domain, an ...interesting mix). I find it hard to read something because I ought to, or someone asked me to, or whatever. The heart wants what the heart wants, eh? However, occasionally a book comes along and I think: yes, there's a lot I want to say about this! 

Such a book is Tom Mead's new novella The Lamp in the Window, available to order from Absinthe Books. Again, full disclosure: I requested a review copy from Absinthe. When the magic words “M.R.James” appeared in the blurb I couldn’t resist. As anyone who’s read some of my older posts will know, I’m an absolute M.R.James fiend. This is a lifelong passion; when my siblings and I were tiny, our father used to retell the stories for us to stave off boredom. I remember I particularly loved “Wailing Well”. In addition to a great love of MRJ’s ghost stories, in the early 2000s I found myself living very close to the German setting of “The Treasure of Abbot Thomas”, and that sparked an interest in James’s foreign locations. Since then, in addition to Steinfeld, I have also visited St. Bertrand de Comminges, Viborg and Marcilly-le-Hayer. I wrote about these visits for the small press newsletter Ghosts and Scholars, and I have also spoken at several M.R.James conferences. 

Over the years, I have also read a good deal of “Jamesian” fiction. It’s not surprising that there’s a lot of it about, since MRJ is considered the classic ghost story writer par excellence. I myself completed his unfinished story “The Game of Bear” for Ghosts and Scholars and I have also written a prequel to “Canon Alberic’s Scrap-book” and a sequel to “A Neighbour’s Landmark”. Some of the Jamesian fiction out there has (in my opinion) been very good, and some of it has felt like rather tepid pastiche. So when I hear of something described as “inspired by M.R.James” I am naturally keen to read it and see what I think. 

The Lamp in the Window does not disappoint. There are some thoroughly chilling moments in it, particularly in the “Old Spindlejack” tale; there are some Jamesian details which will instantly recall certain stories to the mind of the M.R.James fan; and the framing device of the narrative of Spence and the four students works brilliantly. 

To begin with the last of these, the structure of the novella: as Joanna Briscoe commented in an article in the Guardian some years back, “There are very few full-length ghost novels because of the difficulties of sustaining suspension of disbelief. Readers need to be in a state of tension for the unfathomable to prey on fearful minds, yet this can be maintained by the writer for a limited time without risking nervous exhaustion.” I think there is much truth in this. Some highly successful “novel length” ghost stories, such as Susan Hill’s The Woman in Black, are actually pretty short. My own Too Near The Dead is among my shorter novels. By having an overarching narrative and three disparate short stories within it, The Lamp in the Window creates at least four different opportunities for what the Podcast to the Curious calls the ”Jamesian wallop”. Each individual tale has its own tension, and its own hideous climax, before we come to the resolution of the overarching thread. I think this is an excellent way of maintaining that pleasurable dread throughout the novella. 

I don’t mean to describe any of the short stories in detail (because of spoilers) but I feel that there is an understated feeling of “offness” in each of them, which gradually intrudes more and more until actual nastiness breaks cover. As M.R.James himself remarked in “Ghosts – treat them gently!”, “our ghost should make himself felt by gradual stirrings diffusing an atmosphere of uneasiness before the final flash or stab of horror,” and this absolutely occurs in The Lamp in the Window. We may also recognise some thoroughly Jamesian tropes such as the fatally curious academic, the eldritch book, the melancholy relic of a vanished child. I should say that the horror in the final short story, “Ashes”, goes beyond the bounds of what M.R.James would have done, but not to a jarring extent: the limits are elastic, rather than burst. And after all, part of the interest in reading Jamesian fiction is seeing where the author has built on it, rather than simply trying to reproduce James. 

Finally, the wealth of small Jamesian details in the novella is a delight. I do not think I have ever come across Piccadilly weepers before, except in “The Tractate Middoth”. In “Old Spindlejack” our hero reaches the church he wishes to visit by taking a train and then a pony and trap, which is exactly what Somerton, the protagonist of “The Treasure of Abbot Thomas”, does – a detail which has long stuck out in my mind because a trap is really not a sensible way of getting from Koblenz to Steinfeld! The other thing that I enjoyed very much was the history of seventeenth century glazier Cornelius Van Kampen, whose masterpiece supposedly resides in the church of St. Sigrid in Ghent. The details of Van Kampen have a strong aura of authenticity, to the extent that I did look him up to see whether he existed. I was rather foxed by St. Sigrid’s church, since I know Ghent fairly well, having set a book there, and I didn’t remember any such building. Both Van Kampen and St. Sigrid’s are inventions of the author, but convincingly done, and this is in itself quintessentially Jamesian; when MRJ wrote “The Treasure of Abbot Thomas” he included quotations from the Sertum Steinfeldense Norbertinum, an entirely made-up book. So believable was this invention, that when a German priest connected to Steinfeld read the story, he wrote to M.R.James and asked him where he had seen this book, since so far as he knew, the abbey library had been destroyed! 

I thoroughly recommend The Lamp in the Window; bravo, Tom Mead!

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Talking editors!

STEAL ME, says the book... 

Well, before that came WRITE ME, when I had the idea for a story about a cursed bookshop where every volume offers an insidious message. And somewhere in between the two was EDIT ME, a sometimes unsung but critical part of the creative process! Steal Me's editor was Marie O'Regan (below), the Managing Editor of PS Publishing's award-winning novella imprint Absinthe Books. 

Marie is an award-winning author and editor, based in Derbyshire.  She has released four short fiction collections, a bestselling novel, Celeste, and her fiction has appeared in magazines and anthologies in several countries – including The Mammoth Book of Halloween Stories, and Best British Horror among others. To date, she has co-edited fifteen anthologies (several of which were award-nominated), and solo edited the  bestselling The Mammoth Book of Ghost Stories by Women and Phantoms. An ex-Chair of the British Fantasy Society and the UK Chapter of the Horror Writers Association, she also ran ChillerCon UK in Scarborough in May 2022. As mentioned, Marie is also Managing Editor of Absinthe Books, novellas from which have won the Shirley Jackson award (alongside several nominations) and the World Fantasy Award for Best Novella. It has also garnered several nominations for the British Fantasy Awards, the Aurealis Awards and the Bram Stoker™ Awards.

One of the things I find intriguing about Marie is that she both writes and edits. These two roles require quite different skills sets; I have had one stint as an editor myself, for the small press mag Ghosts and Scholars, and I found it really difficult. How do you winnow through all the submissions you get? How do you reject people tactfully? And how do you give necessary feedback diplomatically too? Hand on heart, I don't think I have what it takes to do that on a regular basis. However, I think that being a writer probably informs being an editor, in the sense that you have been on the other end of the rejections and the (sometimes tactful, sometimes not) feedback. And you have creative opinions. 

I asked Marie whether she has a preference: writing or editing? She said: "I like editing and writing – but like editing my own work least, as it’s so easy to get too close to it." I have to say I agree with this. I don't like editing my own work! In an ideal world I'd do a perfect first draft and never have to change anything. Alas, this never happens. 

Above: I managed to find a pic of me and Marie (and Marie's other half, writer Paul Kane), at a signing in London in 2023!

Prior to Steal Me, I had worked with Marie (or Marie and Paul) on various other projects: I wrote a story called 'The Chain Walk' for Phantoms, 'A Curse is a Curse' for Twice Cursed, 'The Third Curse' for Beyond and Within: Folk Horror, 'The Professor of Ontography' for In These Hallowed Halls and 'Remembrance' for Beyond and Within: Witchcraft. The thing I really love about working with Marie (and Paul) is the wide range of themes involved. I'd personally hate to always be confined to traditional ghost stories, loveable though they are. 'A Curse is a Curse', for example (and I'm trying not to give any spoilers here) possibly slips over into sci fi. 'The Third Curse' has a time-slip theme blended with eco-horror. 'The Professor of Ontography', a story I had great fun writing, draws on my fondness for M.R.James, my experiences of Oxford in the 1980s, and some other weird ingredient which is probably best defined as body horror. I found the briefs for these anthologies just about perfect for me - I like a bit of freedom to twist the theme into something unexpected, but at the same time my heart sinks a bit if the brief is too broad. I find ideas are sparked more readily when there is a clear (and interesting!) theme, and Marie always comes up with those. 

When it came to Steal Me, I was faced with a bit of a challenge. Everything I'd done was either a short story or a full-length novel of over 70,000 words; I had never attempted a novella before. It was an interesting experience. If I'd been writing a full length novel, there were some strands I would have developed more, particularly the relationship between the two main characters. But actually it was fun keeping things shorter and more punchy, and not fretting about word count (I dread the day I write a novel and it comes in at 60,000 words, which feels like neither fish nor fowl). Anyway, horror website Ginger Nuts of Horror was kind enough to say: "Grant has moved from the slow burn of the full Gothic novel to something tighter and more fable-like, and the discipline suits her." Phew. 

As mentioned, Marie manages the Absinthe imprint of novellas, and her second novella Resurrection Blues was published last year by Black Shuck Books. So once again she's been on both sides, authoring and editing. I asked her about this, and particularly whether she feels drawn to shorter forms such as short stories and novellas. She said: "I think the idea dictates the form. I enjoy writing shorter fiction, and also novels – some ideas have one strong central image, for me, but I don’t feel there’s enough ‘meat on the bones’ to write more than a short story. Other ideas have more potential to develop various strands within the main idea, and how many of those that story can include then decides the length of that tale – whether it ends up being a novella or a novel."

I also asked Marie what she thinks makes a good novella (a question I probably should have put to her before I blithely embarked on writing one!). She said: "I think with any story, not just a novella, there has to be a clear central theme – as I mention above, for a novella, there has to be enough material to keep the reader interested for the length of a novella, without leaving them feeling as if the story’s been padded – or feeling as if there’s a lot left unsaid and the story would have worked better developed as a novel. I look for the heart of a story, and its characters, rather than looking for what length I feel it should have first, if that makes sense. So as with any tale, you need that theme, you need enough of a story to keep the reader involved for that length of tale, and characters/situations they can fully empathise with and visualise."

As for the challenges of writing one: "The same comments apply, really. The challenge would be to recognise when developing a particular story strand in an attempt to write a novel would work to the detriment of the story, and to limit yourself to a novella if that’s the story’s natural length."

If you'd like to explore Marie's work as both writer and editor, here are some of her latest titles: 

The novella Resurrection Blues, published by Black Shuck Books in May 2025, and a collection, Bleed For Me, published by Demain Publishing in December 2025. Anthologies (with Paul Kane): The Hopeless Romantic’s Guide to Enchantment and Land of Oz, coming from Titan Books in September 2026, Beyond & Within: Witchcraft (January 2026) and Beyond & Within: Best Served Cold (July 2026) from Flame Tree Press.

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Talking cover art

 

I think I now have twelve books out there in the wild, if you count my two collections, and as they've been published by - lemme see - five different publishers, they have some very different cover art. (And then there are the foreign editions, which are completely different again.) I've definitely loved some covers more than others, and I've also been far more involved in the development of some covers than others. There was one book that was up on Amazon before I'd even seen the cover design... 

When PS Publishing's Absinthe imprint took on my novella Steal Me, I was thrilled (and grateful) to be involved in the process. The cover art is by World Fantasy Award-winning British illustrator John Coulthart and I have to say, I absolutely love it! I think it captures the essence of the book perfectly. Supernatural Tales' recent review of Steal Me asks: Who are the superficially nice old ladies who run the shop? Where do they come from? What do they want? and the cover manages to hint at all of that without any spoilers - if you take a really close look at the old lady on the cover, you'll see a few hints that she isn't all she seems. John has given her a doll-like look that is unsettling and suggests that what we see is artificial. 

Take a look at the full cover and you'll see that the back has the name of the bookshop - Legends - as it would appear on the shop window. That weirdly spiky text is not actually a standard font - John found it in an old lettering book called Art Alphabets and Lettering, by JM Bergling. John says of this: "I think I may have said before that it's good sometimes to look for unusual sources instead of choosing a font equivalent. Font designers keep making digital versions of old lettering designs - many of them specialise in this - but there are still plenty of old designs that haven't yet been digitised." That is the sort of attention to detail that I really love about John's work. It also feels a wee bit meta - it kind of makes the book itself, which is about a cursed bookshop and all the ominous books in it, into an item with an archaic heritage. 

John has actually done a cover illustration for one of my books before, and that was Atmospheric Disturbances (Swan River Press), which came out late in 2024. The peerless Brian J. Showers, who runs Swan River, very much involved me in the process of developing cover art and I probably drove the poor bloke bananas by being so fussy. I've blogged about Swan River covers before as they are very varied. Some of them are very sharply realistic looking, and others are impressionistic, and I have to say that I personally like the sharp, detailed ones the best. So we looked at various very impressionistic styles, which to be fair can be excellent for suggesting vaguely sinister and weird things, but they weren't really doing it for me. Brian kindly did not throw the entire project in Dublin bay and stump away swearing under his breath. In the end he came up with John Coulthart. 

I think the Atmospheric Disturbances cover is gorgeous, and all those little squares (there are more on the back of the book) represent the different stories. There's one about the Paris Catacombs, one about petrospheres... you get the drift. 

The things I really love about John's work are the clarity and detail. There's a kind of cleanness, a sharp edge, about the lines. I've always really liked that sort of thing (one of my favourite painters is Hans Holbein the Younger!). You can see a lot of examples of this on John's website. 

I asked John about this and he said: "The hard-edged look I always think of as the Michael Whelan style since he's an exemplar of this kind of painting, but there are plenty of other artists doing similar things. I've spent most of this year working on a series of book illustrations in the same style." He added: "It's taken me a while to get used to doing this using digital materials. I used to work with acrylic paints which give a similar look but the process is obviously very different. Not everyone wants such a hard look, however. I've just done a poster for a group of Irish film-makers which they wanted to look more nebulous and diffuse. I try to be flexible."

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STEAL ME, says the book...

STEAL ME, says the book. 

Rowan is holding it open with her two hands, and she feels the tremor that passes through them. Her eyes widen. Warmth floods into her face and she feels sure she must be going red, guiltily red, as though everyone in the bookshop can read her thoughts. As though she’s responsible for what it says in large bold letters at the top of the page. 

She closes her eyes, squeezing them tight shut, and counts to seven—her lucky number, the number of fairytales and magic. Then she opens them again and reads: 

STEAL ME. You know you want to. 

Thus begins my brand new novella, available to order now from PS Publishing. Steal Me is about a gorgeous looking bookshop that opens on the high street of a small Scottish town, exciting comment from both book lovers and prophets of financial doom alike. It's a shop with a book for everyone -but it's also a shop you don't want opening anywhere near you, believe me! 

Steal Me comes to you thanks to Marie O'Regan, an award-nominated writer and editor who is Managing Editor of Absinthe Books, an imprint of PS dedicated to the novella. 

It has cover art from John Coulthart, who also created the cover for my recent collection Atmospheric Disturbances, from Swan River Press. I absolutely love John's work and was thrilled when he agreed to do the cover of Steal Me!

I'll be blogging about both Marie and John in the next few days as there is so much more that I want to say about them and I can't fit it all in one blog post. 

Meantime, I'd like to talk a little bit about book locations! If you happen to have read any of my previous books, you'll probably know that I get a lot of inspiration from real life places. My first ever novel, The Vanishing of Katharina Linden, was set in the German town of Bad Münstereifel, where I and my family lived for seven years. Bad M is an amazing place, full of history and absolutely wild folklore, and so it wasn't surprising that those things worked their way out as a book. 

Later, we moved to Flanders and I set some of my later books there (guess where Demons of Ghent is set? heh), and after that we moved to Scotland, where we have been ever since. Before Steal Me I had already created fictional mayhem in my sleepy part of Perthshire, with my novels Ghost, Too Near The Dead and Jump Cut. Steal Me continues this trend, with the arrival of Legends bookshop in a small town suspiciously like the one I live in. 

You can see some of the locations that inspired the book in this video!

Of course, the town in the book isn't exactly like my home town. It's more loosely based on it. The library isn't like the one in the book, which is an older building right in the centre - we actually have a modern community campus library on the edge of town. There used to be an older library in the town, but it is now the local arts centre, and it isn't in the spot where the library is located in the book either. So there's a bit of switching around, but the one thing I did want to do is accurately represent a small town with heart - one you'd fight for, as my heroine, Rowan, decides to do. 

Ever since I started writing full time, I've been very influenced by my environment. I spend quite a lot of time walking about (this was especially true during the pandemic) and if I see something interesting, it often sparks ideas. Sometimes these are quite ominous ideas! I think the classic case is the block of flats I used to pass on a particular bus journey. One window in this block was full of Spiderman memorabilia, and I often used to think how cute it was that some little kid's mum had indulged his mania for Spiderman to that extent. Then one day I thought: yeah, but supposing he's 50 and his mum is 80, and she won't let him out??? 

It's all about the way you look at things, I guess. In Steal Me I looked at my quiet, largely predictable, mostly respectable little town, and saw some monsters peeping out. I hope you'll enjoy reading about them! 

EasterCon Belfast

I do not have very much experience of attending conventions. I did once attend one in Glasgow to keep my daughter company; I can't even remember which con it was, although I do remember the guy in the very convincing Pyramid Head costume. (Apparently people put Pyramid Head on their hear-me-out cakes but I'm not going to be doing that any time soon. Brrrr.) Anyway, I decided I really ought to dip my toe in the water. I love so much of the stuff that is celebrated and I actually write horror and fantasy, for goodness' sake. So last weekend I went to EasterCon in Belfast.

The journey there was a bit of an Odyssey. I decided to travel in an eco friendly way, so I opted for the ferry from Cairnryan. This would have been fine, except I rang the ferry company to check there would be parking at the terminal, and they said they couldn't guarantee it. It was Easter weekend, after all. So my long suffering husband had to drive me down there. Then the ferry was late (and quite raucous). I arrived in Belfast feeling a bit the worse for wear, to find that the bus had left 90 minutes before and there wasn't another one for ages. Eventually I shelled out for a taxi. I suppose I could consider that entire journey a penance to Gaia or something. On the way home I had to fly; I just couldn't make the logistics work. 

I had two panels arranged for the weekend. When I looked at the programme I realised that other people had scheduled far more events, but being a newbie I didn't want to overdo it. One of the panels was "Lost Films, Old Tech: The Appeal of Analogue Horror" and the other one was "X Never, Ever Marks the Spot: Archaeology in Speculative Fiction". 

Anyway, here's the Old Tech panel. Left to right: friendly tech person, Ramsey Campbell, Neil Williamson, Lynda E. Rucker (moderator), me, Ben Unsworth.

                   

(Pic with thanks to Ben Unsworth)

Big thanks to Lynda for her excellent moderation! I enjoyed this panel so much, especially since I got to talk about some of my favourite obsessions, including M.R.James (yes! there is tech in his stories!) and recent film Broadcast Signal Intrusion. I've been interested in old technology in books and films for a long time (see previous blog post on novels about old movies), probably since hearing Aaron Worth (Associate Professor at Boston University) speaking about the "Haunted Cinematography of M.R.James" at a conference in 2015. 

One of the things Aaron Worth highlighted was the uniquely ominous character of outdated technology: the grainy images, the crackling soundtrack. I have to agree with this; I think, for example, that Nosferatu (1922) is still frightening in spite of being superseded by modern special effects, because it is palpably ancient. There is a dark griminess to it, as though it is something excavated from a bad place. Film technology is now old enough to take the place of handwritten documents and antique engravings in supernatural fiction, particularly given that we do not necessarily want to put apparitions and phenomena too far into the past: M.J.James himself commented "It cannot be said too often that the more remote in time the ghost is the harder it is to make him effective." His phantoms are often of relatively recent date, and nowadays that would put them firmly in the era of the moving image. Arguably also film is the latest form of the "uncanny valley"; the moving image looks exactly like a person but isn't a living person.  

As mentioned, there is a surprising amount of tech in M.R.James's stories (cameras, trams etc). But undoubtedly the most unsettling piece of technology is the magic lantern show which Mr. Karswell puts on for the village children in "Casting the Runes". It prefigures the terrifying moment in The Ring  (2002) when Samara crawls out of the TV screen:

"He switched on another slide, which showed a great mass of snakes, centipedes, and disgusting creatures with wings, and somehow or other he made it seem as if they were climbing out of the picture and getting in amongst the audience; and this was accompanied by a sort of dry rustling sound which sent the children nearly mad."

"Casting the Runes" was published in 1911, by which time movies were well established. Magic lanterns were still in use but had been technically overtaken by more sophisticated media, so they were already old tech. 

Anyway, that was a massive digression! As you can see, the problem with this topic is not getting me to talk about it; it's getting me to shut up...

The Archaeology panel took place half an hour after the Old Tech one ended, and alas, I do not have a picture of it. It was moderated by Liz Bourke and featured David Hodson, Sharan Volin, Kari Sperring (Maund) and me. 

I have a lot of thoughts about archaeology in speculative fiction and films; far more thoughts, in fact, than I was able to squeeze into my panel contributions! So I might blog about those separately. The general consensus (unsurprisingly) was that archaeology in books and films isn't much like real life archaeology. My son is a field archaeologist working here in Scotland, and as I remarked during the panel, if anyone made a realistic film based on what he does, it would be about three weeks long and the protagonist would spend most of that time standing next to a trench in a hard hat and steel toe capped boots; in the last reel they would discover a few places where the earth was a different colour, indicating that wooden posts had once been there. Those Indiana Jones-type movies where archaeologists rush about grabbing precious artefacts, or have to decipher arcane scripts at high speed with everyone screaming at them, are not true to life. But you know what? The excitement is real. I can get very passionate about petrospheres and Viking burials, even if nobody zoomed in and snatched them from under the nose of a bunch of villains.

A propos, I have written several stories featuring archaeology in one way or another, and you can listen to one of them in this recording by David Longhorn: "Gold" - two others, "The Valley of Achor" and "The Edge of the World" (in which I offer an explanation for the mysterious purpose of petrospheres) can be found in my collection Atmospheric Disturbances from Swan River Press. 

Other highlights included attending a very interesting panel on the topic of "Irish Mythology and Horror" (had to be done, didn't it?) and bagging a signed Adrian Tchaikovsky book for my daughter.

I also spent quite a lot of time hanging out at the Swan River Press stand in the Dealers' Room, where the indefatigable Brian J. Showers (below) presented some truly gorgeous volumes and could also be persuaded to blether for hours and hours about books, publishing, and conventions. 

Anyway, that was my first proper Con - let's hope it's the first of many!