There are, MR James tells us, five conditions that must be met for a perfect ghost story: the pretence of truth, a “pleasing terror”, no explanation of the machinery, no gratuitous horror, and that the story belong to the writer’s (and reader’s) “own day”. In Lauren Mooney’s sharply observed debut novel, Danielle lives a precarious existence…
GHOST TOWN, by Tom Perrotta Upon finishing Tom Perrotta’s new novel, “Ghost Town,” I found myself agreeably haunted by the corpulent specter of Harold Bloom: the late, great literary critic who called the Harry Potter books “rubbish only good for the dustbin where they will certainly wind up in a generation or so,” and Stephen…
On Sunday, Ukraine marks the 40th anniversary of the Chernobyl nuclear accident. Reactor number 4 at the plant exploded on 26 April 1986, spewing out radioactive material that would spread across swathes of Europe. The official death toll from the incident in Chornobyl – as it is known in Ukrainian – is 31, but the…
Shorouk Express Get the free Morning Headlines email for news from our reporters across the world Sign up to our free Morning Headlines email Sign up to our free Morning Headlines email An express Manchester to London train service will now take passengers after the rail regulator overturned its decision to run it as a…
The year is 2030. An “infamous mystery hacker” known as the Puppet Master is wreaking havoc on the internet, breaking into the so-called cyber-brains of several humans as well as “every terminal on the network.” As it turns out, the Puppet Master is a creation of Japan’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs. In other words, the…
