KEY POINTS:
I have loved ghost stories since I was a small child. For as long as I can remember, I've been addicted to the exhilaration of being scared.
Nothing comes close to the initial thrill of spine-jangling horror, the electricity and freshness of recognising something new and previously unimagined to be afraid of.
Fairy tales were the first stories to frighten me. I devoured the Collected Brothers Grimm and had dreams peopled with murderers and monsters: the Big Bad Wolf, slavering and obscene in Nana's nightdress, Snow White and her wizened old witch of a poisoner, Sleeping Beauty and the murderous bad fairy that put her a coma.
True, there was always a handsome prince or providentially passing woodcutter to rescue the maidens and save the day, but not before the reader got a good sniff of real evil, a clear impression of the perils lying in wait for us at every turn as we pick our way through the world.
I remember those stories now, not for the Freudian subtexts it's so fashionable to recognise in them - a red jacket! A pointy spindle! The sublimated sexuality of a coma! - but as lessons.
They taught me that the world is a dangerous place, that nothing is ever what it seems, and to look askance at old crones bearing shiny apples. You'd be surprised at how often that comes in handy.
The problem with ghost stories though, is the reverb.
The hours and nights after the story has been told or read and the initial thrill of horror has had time to dissipate, to percolate down into the mind and germinate there until unpleasant ideas have taken hold and one is entirely suffused by a lingering sense of unease.
Reading a ghost story by the likes of M. R. James or Edgar Allan Poe is a pleasantly hair-raising experience. These are artists at the top of their game, who know exactly how to craft a tale of supernatural suspense.
Less pleasant is the experience of turning out the light and lying in the darkness, alone, immediately after finishing one. I got exactly two hours sleep the last time I read Casting the Runes. And yet, I come back for more.
Bram Stoker, Arthur Conan Doyle. Sheridan le Fanu, Maturin. My favourites, the stories I've been reading since I graduated from The Brothers Grimm, the ones I return to again and again.
Which is why it wasn't so surprising to find myself indulging in an orgy of ghost stories the other night.
You know how it is; drinking with a friend and somehow, the topic of the supernatural is introduced to the conversation. "My mother met a psychic at a dinner last year." From there we were off. Spirits, ghosts, feelings in the waters, a haunting in Grey Lynn. Strange rappings and tappings, a young boy who went mad.
This friend paints a particularly vivid picture, and obviously relished her subject matter. I urged her on, knowing it would be another two hour night.
Later on, I was watching television and a promo came on for that awful show; the one which gets flaky women with mad 90s hair and horrible clothes to revisit old tragedies and "see" whodunnit.
As a horror fiend I should by rights be a sucker for this sort of thing, but watching even clips of it disgusts me.
It's bad enough recreating unsolved murders, rapes and abductions and serving them up as prime-time entertainment, but watching bereaved families and friends trying to talk some crumb of comfort from the open-ended gobbledegook spouted by these mountebanks is absolutely painful.
It's nothing new - vulnerable, grieving people have always been a target for snake-oil snakesmen and charlatans of all sorts, but presenting this sort of gimcrackery as entertainment is a circus act at which even Phineas T. Barnum would baulk.
Werewolves and vampires look more attractive than ever when you compare them to the lowest common denominator freakshow dished up for us every week on prime-time TV.
