Strange Coincidences
Supernatural fiction is not always the easiest genre to write in and be original and innovative. A lot of tropes and cliches get re-used and re-hashed over and over again. Haunted houses, dark pasts, missing, psychic or dead children, ghosts, unreliable narrators- they are all familiar examples within the medium. In 2001 I wrote a supernatural ghost story called 'Requiem', and I eventually published it in my 2010 short story collection 'Beyond Twilight'. It was about a ghost hunter called Nick Weston who stays at a supposedly haunted house in a strange little village. Nick is haunted by the death of his wife, and is actually a sceptic when it comes to the supernatural. He's very much a hero of the sort James Herbert would have written for his lurid horror novels, but as the story progresses he becomes an unreliable narrator. I noted recently that the BBC had made a supernatural series called 'Requiem'. The fact that the title was the same was not u...