Steve Nallon's Ghost Stories: Twelve Spooky Tales of Supernatural Strangeness and Weirdly Wonderful Goings On

Steve Nallon's Ghost Stories is a darkly humorous collection of twelve ghost stories for grown-ups offering modern takes on the classic British supernatural tradition - including:* There's a tale with a plan to expose fraudulent clairvoyants that leads to unexpectedly grave consequences. * A Gothic horror featuring the biblical Witch of Endor. * Lady Thatcher a-haunting Downing Street and freaking out recent prime ministers, including the present incumbent, Sir Keir Starmer. * A murder mystery set in an old manor house where a symposium on the Victorian ghost tale is taking place. * A creepy Halloween homage to M.R. James. * A laugh-out-loud farce involving a frolicsome Hattie Jacques taking up ghostly residence in the downstairs toilet of two gay bears. * Plus Christmas angels, unaccountable shadows and a theatre ghost! All twelve stories have lavish, full colour digital paintings by Spitting Image artist and illustrator, Scott Brooker.

Table of Contents:
Introduction - The Collection The Oath of Aesculapius 'It's What She Would Have Wanted' The Portrait of a Looking-Glass Visiting Hattie The Final Fake The Return of the Handbag ' 'I Was Once a Haunted House' The Strange Case of the Unaccountable Shadow, For the Hell of It The Ghost Light Who Fed the Cat? Under the Mistletoe Appendix I - Thoughts on the Ghost Tale Appendix II - A Yelly Nada in Polari Appendix III - Transcripts of two lectures given at the Claverley Manor Conference Centre symposium: 'The Ghosts of Many Worlds'.

About the Author :
Steve Nallon is a writer and actor. He began his performing life with his own comedy act on the Northern Working Men's Club circuit in Yorkshire back in the 1970s. After gaining a degree in Drama and English at the University of Birmingham, Steve became a founding member of the television series Spitting Image, where for over a decade he voiced many of the programme's most iconic characters, including Margaret Thatcher, Alan Bennett and The Queen Mum. Steve's acting work now ranges from theatre, film and television, to video games, radio drama and audio books. As a playwright and comedy writer, Steve has a considerable body of credits to his name, including plays and series for BBC radio, three one-man theatre shows and the satirical book I, Margaret, which he co-wrote with Tom Holt. In 2022 Steve's novel The Time That Never Was, the first book in a new young adult book series called The Swidgers, was published by Luath Press, and the second in the series, The Time T hey Saved Tomorrow, came out in 2024. Destination Time Travel, an exploration of the story tropes of time travel tales written with British Film Institute archivist Dick Fiddy, was published in 2023. Over the years, Steve has contributed to numerous periodicals such as The New Statesman and Musical Stages, and is a much sought after speaker on the lecture circuit and in university colleges for his insightful and amusing talks. Growing up in a haunted house, Scott Brooker is no stranger to the weird and supernatural - talking of which, he first met Steve in 1984, when a ghastly career as a character designer and puppet-maker began upon joining the Spitting Image team in an old banana warehouse in London's Docklands. Since then, he has designed and/or made many characters for television, film, ads and theatre, including the Peperami sausage, Rattus from CBBC's Horrible Histories, and the woefully under-rated The Harry Hill Movie. T hanks to Steve, this is Scott's first foray into the weird and supernatural world of publishing...

Review :
'One of our best impersonators has now found his voice as a writer - stories full of wit, character and intrigue, as entertaining as any of Steve's characters.' Rory Bremner, 'FABULOUS. Fascinating tales. Fascinating writing. Fascinating wit. Steve Nallon has a HIT... Needs to be show, Netflix are you listening?' Christian Dion, 'Steve Nallon's "It's What She Would Have Wanted" is funny, relatable and spookily familiar - finding the funny in death is no mean feat and Nallon has done it - read this and take heed, it could well be you one day!' Arabella Weir 'These are absolute GENIUS! Perfectly formed, individually wrapped treats, to be consumed by the fireside, a large sherry in hand, the fingers of long branches scraping across a window. A mixture of Wodehouse, Conan Doyle and fresh Nallon, these spooky tales chill and thrill in equal amounts.' James Dreyfus, 'Just when you thought it was safe, she's back. A shiver will run down your back when you learn of the return of Mrs T in ghostly form. Be afraid. Very afraid.' Iain Dale, 'With a fine grasp of character and idiolect, Steve Nallon conjures up worlds with a great sense of authenticity and an even greater sense of imagination... Steve has an uncanny ability to find fresh and disturbing images - of life and death - in what we think are familiar worlds.' Alistair McGowan