A ghostly procession

With Hallowe'en at hand, a person's thoughts turn to all things creepy. Well, mine do, anyway. So I'm posting a link to one of the creepiest things I know of: the Blankenheim Geisterzug ("ghost parade").

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ft6comOyH2w&list=UU-Yw600YJyQR1g65YhnxHCg&index=5&feature=plcp

Blankenheim is a small German town about 20km from Bad Münstereifel (Bad Münstereifel was my home from 2001 to 2008 and the setting of two of my books, The Vanishing of Katharina Linden and Wish Me Dead). Like other towns and villages in the region, Blankenheim has a "normal" Karneval celebration around February every year. Unusually, it also has a ghostly Karneval procession too.
The Geisterzug consists of residents of the town dressed as ghosts - only not any old ghosts, and other eldritch creatures such as vampires, ghouls and zombies are not allowed. The ghost costume is made by wearing a sheet with ears (or perhaps they are horns) knotted into it, for a distinctive effect which you can see in the video. The "ghosts" proceed through the narrow streets of Blankenheim in a zigzagging dance to the strains of Juh jah, Kribbel en der Botz, a local Karneval song (Kribbel en der Botz means something along the lines of ants in your pants). This is the music you can hear playing in the film. 
The ghosts are accompanied by witches with fearsome papier maché masks and carrying brooms with which they menace the spectators; some people think that this is connected to an older ritual of driving out evil spirits at the end of winter. There is also a "head ghost" who unlike the others has wings, and rides on a horse, and a devil. During the procession the electrical lights in the town are extinguished and torches are carried.
I have attended the Geisterzug twice and it made a very strong impression on me. It reminds me somewhat of the sinister procession in The Wicker Man (original version)! There are other (and bigger) ghost parades in other places, but this one is peculiarly atmospheric, given the backdrop of Blankenheim itself, with its cobbled streets and half-timbered houses. Very creepy!   

In which my cousin calls me a nutter & the Bookwitch says I can be an honorary Swede...

I haven't been online very much this week, because sporty outdoor hubs, the resident techie, small son and I had our first family holiday for several years (I am not counting trips to see relatives or trips taken by only some of us). In keeping with the prevailing economic climate, it was what you might call an Austerity Holiday. We camped. In a tent. In Scotland. And it's October. I expect Bear Grylls would think nothing of this ("A tent? Luxury!" etc) but for me this represented the outer limits of intrepidity. I am about 70% of the way through my current work in progress, The Demons of Ghent, and more or less had to be dragged away from my laptop kicking and screaming. The resident techie was probably the least keen of all of us and considered our actual departure as the crowning failure of a month-long campaign to talk us out of going, which included texting despairing messages to her friends and saying "I really, really don't want to go, you know," in a low savage voice at every opportunity. Small son's feelings were more ambivalent since he was weighing up the gorgeous benefit of not having to wash for days at a time against the terrifying disadvantage of NO INTERNET.

Luckily sporty outdoor hubs had more than enough enthusiasm for the rest of us. When he was a small freckled-faced boy, virtually identical in appearance to small son (we suspect some covert cloning when I wasn't looking), he used to holiday at Arisaig on the west coast of Scotland with his parents. Overcome with a fit of nostalgia that outweighed the prospect of freezing to death inside our sleeping bags, he booked us a pitch at the optimistically-named Sunnyside Croft campsite, which overlooks the sea. When he showed me an online photo of the campsite I could quite clearly see the sea in the background. I had alarming visions of us spending every waking moment being scoured by the horizontal salt spray being swept in by the biting Atlantic winds. I told sporty outdoor hubs this. He said, "If it's horrible we can come home early." Whilst he was saying this I was watching his face like a hawk, waiting for the tell-tale shift of the gaze to the side that gives away the lying serial killer in books. He seemed perfectly sincere, but there was still the slightly worrying thought that his definition of "horrible" is not the same as mine. We work to two different scales, like fahrenheit and centigrade, and his doesn't bottom out at the zero point of horridness at the same point as mine. I mean, this is the man who voluntarily camped out somewhere so cold that the water in his Sigg bottle froze solid. This is the man who thinks gathering wet twigs to light the kelly kettle and make tea in a tin mug is a viable alternative to going into a warm tea shop and ordering a pot of English Breakfast and a plate of scones with jam. This is the man....well, you get the picture. Clearly there was no escape for the rest of us. We delivered the cats to the cattery, packed the car and set off.
It was at this point that sporty outdoor hubs got lucky with the weather. He insists that we all got lucky with the weather, but I contend that if it had been abysmal we would probably have survived it - somehow - but he would never have heard the end of it. After a miserable wet summer in which the only sunshine we saw was in Bad Münstereifel, we had five days of clear, dry, windless weather, and the sun actually shone. We spent hours on the beach, collecting shells, climbing about on the rocks and kayaking around the bay.

On the Monday it was so fine - hubs reckoned the air temperature was about 12 degrees - that I actually decided to go for a swim in the sea (in my swimming costume; no wetsuit). I love to swim outdoors and this was a personal record in terms of the date (late October) and the latitude (northern Scotland). It was indeed very cold, but I've swum in colder water, including a glacial stream in the Atlas Mountains, though that was by mistake - I waded in and then fell over! This was pretty icy but it was bearable, and worth it just to say that I had done it, though when I got out of the water my skin was bright red with cold as though I had been slapped! My cousin proclaimed me a "nutter" after hearing about this adventure and the Bookwitch told me I could be a honorary Swede if I like. I wonder if this makes me a "Scandi Crime" writer..?
Later in the week we took a ferry trip from Mallaig to the islands of Eigg and Muck, also in glorious sunshine - although the wind was rather biting up on deck and we eventually retreated to the extremely snug passengers' lounge. There we had a very interesting chat with a retired lady who had grown up on Eigg and had had to go away to boarding school on Skye at the age of 12 - at that time a long trip in several stages taken in an open boat in all weathers and sometimes at night! I looked across the lounge at small son and tried to imagine sending him away like that.
On the way back from Eigg the boat was accompanied by porpoises, who leapt playfully through the foamy wake.

Every evening we watched the sun setting behind the island of Eigg (left) - every evening was different, all were stunningly beautiful.
I still think it was a mad idea going camping in a tent in Scotland in October. There were moments when it was uncomfortable - such as the morning when we all woke up at 5am and were unable to get back to sleep because we had gone to bed at 8pm when it got too dark to do anything. Cooking for four on two Trangia stoves (when you are also sharing the gas cannister from one of them with the camping lantern) loses its appeal after a couple of days. Searching the sleeping compartments for the source of an evil aroma and finding a pair of wet socks lurking under one of the mats is pretty nasty too! Was it worth it, though? Yes, definitely.

NB I debated with myself before posting about any of this, since it does not really have anything to do with books or writing (in fact I hardly did any reading all week and did not write so much as a postcard, since neither of those occupations is comfortable outdoors in October). Sporty outdoor hubs says it is acceptable subject matter since it could all be material for a future book set in Scotland. Personally I am not convinced. I think it is reasonable to expect the heroine of a thriller to put up with vengeful serial killers, appalling relationship issues and horrible, impossible dilemmas. But the aroma of wet dirty socks? No. Some things are simply too horrific.

Something nasty for the weekend, sir?

 "...when the heir of Mauleon was in so good a humour it rarely meant anything welcome for anyone else." (Alberic de Mauleon, by Helen Grant)

Today's post brought me a treat: my eagerly-awaited author copies of The Ghosts and Scholars Book of Shadows! The book is the result of a competition run by the M.R.James Ghosts and Scholars Newsletter, to write a prequel or sequel to one of M.R.James' ghost stories. The number and quality of entries was considered to be sufficiently good that a book was proposed.
I'm very busy these days working on my novels so I rarely get time to write short fiction any more. However, I really couldn't resist this competition! I've loved the ghost stories of M.R.James since I was a child and my father used to retell them to us to amuse us on boring journeys and long walks. I've also written a number of non-fiction articles about M.R.James, some of which I have republished on this blog, and some of which are available online at the excellent Ghosts and Scholars website: http://www.users.globalnet.co.uk/~pardos/GSNewsIndex.html
I have a particular interest in the foreign locations of M.R.James' stories and have visited and written about Steinfeld abbey, St. Bertrand de Comminges, Viborg and Marcilly-le-Hayer. Perhaps for this reason, I chose to make my entry a prequel to Canon Alberic's Scrap-book, which is set in Comminges. Location is very important to me when I'm writing and I like to use real places (sometimes disguised and renamed) as my settings. Two of my first three novels are set in Bad Münstereifel, the German town where we lived from 2001 to 2008, and my upcoming novel Silent Saturday is set in Flanders, where we lived from 2008 until 2011. I spent nothing like as long as that in Comminges - just a day and a night - but the town and particularly the environs of the cathedral are very clear and vivid in my memory.

Above: the cathedral of Notre-Dame, St. Bertrand de Comminges.

Above: interior of the cathedral showing the amazing carved wooden chancel and organ.

I've always liked Canon Alberic's Scrap-book a lot anyway - there are so many unanswered questions such as what exactly was the much-desired thing about which the Canon asked on the night of December 12th 1694? My story aims to answer some of those questions.

I haven't read the other stories yet but am very much looking forward to doing so. If I can possibly bear to, I may try to save at least one of them up for Hallowe'en! 

The book is very much for M.R.James fans; as the tales are prequels and sequels you need to have read the original stories! 

If you are interested in ordering the book, which is a limited edition hardcover, here are the details: http://sarobpress.blogspot.co.uk/2012/07/ghosts-scholars-book-of-shadows.html

U is for Unshockable Hans!

I just have to share a completely brilliant piece of work I've just seen via Twitter! AlphaBooks is a project to draw fictional characters starting from A and running through to Z. I'm thrilled to say that to represent U, artist Andrew Neal has done a fabulous portrait of Unshockable Hans, the hero of my first novel, The Vanishing of Katharina Linden. You can see it here:
http://wanderlane.com/content/?p=1484
Funnily enough, my original working title for the book was Unshockable Hans, and as you can see from the Spanish book cover shown in the above link, the name was in fact used in Spain although not elsewhere. I have always felt that Hans is the real hero of the book. To me he embodies the town of Bad Münstereifel, my home for seven years and the setting for two of my books. Hans is bold, forthright, afraid of nothing, big-hearted and very Catholic!
Big thanks to Andrew!!

Brrrr! Creepy stuff for Hallowe'en!

I'm not blogging this morning - I'm writing! But here is a guest post I have done for the splendid blog The Mountains of Instead. If you like my Treatise of Specters stuff you'll be glad to see there's some more of it in there!

http://www.mountainsofinstead.com/2012/10/must-there-be-horror-all-hallows-guest.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=twitter&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+TheMountainsOfInstead+%28The+Mountains+of+Instead%29