The Good Unknown

In this new collection of eleven stories, Stephen Volk explores the wide span of possibilities of the ghost story in its various manifestations-from hauntings set in the quotidian modern world, to ones that hark back to traditional, but no less chilling, tales of the past. When battle-scarred army veterans are recruited for an archaeological dig in Wiltshire, more than bones are unearthed, in 'Unrecovered'. A pleasure park becomes anything but pleasurable in 'Three Fingers, One Thumb'. In '31/10' a notorious, fateful BBC TV studio is revisited, while in 'The Waiting Room' a supernatural encounter makes Charles Dickens himself come to question both his creative inspiration and his fundamental beliefs. Three brand new stories are included here: 'The Crossing', 'Baby on Board', and 'Lost Loved Ones'-the latter novella being a sequel to Volk's television series Afterlife and a welcome return for him to the much-loved character of Alison Mundy, the troubled psychic medium, in a world post-Covid. As with the rest of the book, these have the author's trademark mixture of 'horror and heartbreak' (Nathan Ballingrud); qualities that have earned him praise as 'one of our genre's foremost practitioners in the short form' (Peter Tennant, Black Static) and 'one of the most provocative and unsettling of contemporary writers' (Andy Hedgecock, Interzone).