The Memory That Started It

The idea germinated in the back of my mind long before I wrote a word. I thought I’d read a tale about a boatman who terrorised Windermere. In my memory, a hooded figure loomed like the ferryman to Hades. But when I looked the old story up, my memory had deceived me. There was no hooded figure in it at all.

It didn’t matter. The real tale of a ferryman who crossed Windermere one stormy night to answer a mysterious voice calling over the water, returning alone, pale, and unable to speak, and dying hours later, was unsettling enough to do the job. My misremembering had given me a ghost. The original tale had given me the atmosphere.

That combination became the cornerstone of The Tarn.

A Place I Love

I spent years living in the Lake District and walking its hills. Tarns always fascinated me. Dark patches of unfathomable water dropped amongst the craggy rocks and windy peaks. On a sunny day, the surface shatters into a thousand diamonds. On a grey one, it lies flat and blank as slate. They are beautiful and, frankly, a little unnerving.

It would have been impossible to write a ghost story and not set it there.

The story follows Hugh and Esme, a couple who travel up to a remote bungalow Hugh has inherited from his uncle, tucked at the head of a valley near Keswick, a small tarn at the bottom of the garden. It opens with a drive up the M6, an argument, and the car cresting the ridge to reveal “a particularly dark patch, flanked on three sides by the sheer slopes of the scree strewn valley wall.” That dark patch is the tarn.

I wanted readers to feel the place. The beauty of it, and the quiet menace lurking underneath.

The MR James Blueprint

I came to write The Tarn after reading the collected ghost stories of MR James. James was an academic at King’s College Cambridge, writing at the start of the twentieth century. His stories are spine-tingling, precise, and utterly English.

Crucially, he left a blueprint. An everyday setting. A malevolent ghost. Normal people thrown into abnormal circumstances. A “nicely managed crescendo” of tension. Objects as vehicles of evil. And above all, reticence. “Reticence conduces to effect, blatancy ruins it.”

What I didn’t know when I wrote The Tarn was that I’d already been following his rules. I only read his thoughts on the craft after I’d finished. The story is set somewhere off the beaten track near Keswick. The central characters are a couple in their early thirties with a mortgage and an argument about what to do with an inherited property. And the vehicle of evil is a small silk ribbon — a Thuggee garrotte — that Hugh finds on his uncle’s study floor. An ancient object, unremarkable to look at, terrifying in what it demands.

What the Story Does

I won’t say too much. But the garrotte has rules. A price. And once Hugh touches it, the clock starts. He has two nights to make a sacrifice, or the hooded figure haunting the tarn will take him instead.

“So, what you’re telling me is that you’ve got till tonight to kill someone, or you die tonight?”

That exchange between Hugh and Esme is close to what I attempted to make the whole story to feel like. Ordinary people, an extraordinary situation, and the desperate, darkly comic scramble to survive it.

How I Wrote It

I just hammered out a first draft. No outline, no plan. I sat down and wrote until I had something to work with.

Then the real work began. I went through it again and again. Deleted large sections. Added new ones. Rewrote passages until the pacing felt right and the tension built the way James described — that slow, deliberate crescendo that starts with “a placid scene, undisturbed by forebodings” and ends somewhere much darker.

The Lake District, for all its beauty, is full of stories like this one. Lost souls in Easedale Tarn. The faces of the dead staring up from Codale. A spirit at Alcock Tarn that appears in the mist on moonlit evenings. None of those tales made it directly into The Tarn, but they are the soil it grew from.

That soil is old and well worth exploring. Fertile, one might say.

The Tarn is available now. You can find it here.

Not just an idea, or a gap in the market, or some strategy cooked up in a spreadsheet. It comes from years of reading — from afternoons spent on particular books that lodged themselves somewhere deep and wouldn’t leave. The Yarning Room is no different. Before the essays arrive in earnest, before the field guides to real ghosts and forgotten disasters and the dark corners of the English calendar, it felt right to lay out the reading that made all of this feel necessary.

These are the books I’d press into the hands of anyone who wants to understand what this newsletter is trying to do. Some are ghost fiction. Some are post-apocalyptic — several of them, in fact, because the post-apocalyptic imagination will be one of the things this newsletter keeps returning to. Some are folklore. What they share is a quality I’ve found almost impossible to name precisely — call it atmospheric seriousness. They take their subjects with full conviction. They don’t wink at the reader.

That’s what The Yarning Room is trying to do too.

The Death of Grass — John Christopher

Published in 1956 and largely forgotten outside specialist circles, this is one of the most unsettling English novels of the twentieth century. A virus destroys all grasses worldwide — wheat, barley, rice, everything — and England collapses within weeks. What Christopher understood, and what the thriller-paced plot makes viscerally clear, is that civilisation is not robust. It is a thin crust over something much older and much harder, and when the food runs out, the crust breaks fast. The violence in this book is not sensationalised. It is matter-of-fact, which is worse. A direct ancestor of everything The Yarning Room finds interesting about the post-collapse imagination.

The Road — Cormac McCarthy

Perhaps the most widely read book on this list, and for good reason. McCarthy strips everything back — syntax, punctuation, all comfort — until what remains is pure exposure: a father and a son walking through the ash of a dead America. The landscape is theological. The love between father and child is the only warmth left in the world, and McCarthy never lets you forget how close it is to being extinguished.

It is not an easy read. It leaves a mark.

If your appetite for the end of things runs more toward the English countryside than the American highway, pair it with John Wyndham’s The Day of the Triffids — which manages to be somehow both cosier and equally bleak.

English Folk and Fairy Tales — Joseph Jacobs

Collected in the 1890s, this is one of the great source texts for anyone interested in English folklore — and the stories have aged not at all. The voice is dry, often deadpan, occasionally mordant. Giants are outwitted. Bargains are struck and broken. The dead return in forms that aren’t quite right. What strikes a modern reader is how little sentimentality there is. These weren’t stories designed to comfort children; they were stories designed to do something older and more ambiguous than comfort. Jacobs knew that, and it shows.

This is the kind of material that will feed directly into future Yarning Room essays on the English calendar and its stranger edges.

A Canticle for Leibowitz — Walter M. Miller Jr.

The most serious post-apocalyptic novel ever written, and almost certainly the least read on this list outside science fiction circles.

It’s also my favourite.

Set across twelve centuries following a nuclear war, it follows a monastery in the American desert as civilisation collapses, recovers, and destroys itself again. Miller’s theme is the cyclical nature of human catastrophe — not pessimism exactly, but something harder: the suggestion that the pattern does not break, that knowledge is preserved and then burned, over and over. The prose in the first section is extraordinary. The ending is not comfortable. Neither is the question it leaves you sitting with.

The Earth Abides — George R. Stewart

Published in 1949, this is the quietest of the great catastrophe novels and in some ways the strangest.

A plague kills almost everyone. The protagonist, Ish, survives and spends the rest of his long life watching what remains of humanity revert, generation by generation, to something pre-literate and pre-industrial. He cannot stop it. He eventually stops trying. What Stewart is interested in is not survival but time — the long, slow work of forgetting, and what it means to be the last person who remembers.

For a novel about the end of everything, it is remarkably unhurried. That unhurriedness is the point.

Ghost Stories of an Antiquary — M.R. James

The essential collection.

James wrote most of his ghost stories to be read aloud to students at King’s College, Cambridge, on Christmas Eve, and they carry that intimacy — a learned man by a fire, describing things he would really rather not have seen.

The setting is almost always antiquarian: old churches, country houses, manuscripts, cathedral libraries. Which is to say, they are set in exactly the places The Yarning Room tends to haunt.

There’s more — there is always more — but these six are the ones I’d hand to a reader and say: this is the territory. By the time you’ve finished them, you’ll understand The Yarning Room better than any introduction I could write.

Until next time.

— Neil

PS — The Joseph Jacobs is available free on Project Gutenberg. The M.R. James stories have been out of copyright for decades and are similarly available. There is no excuse not to read both this weekend.