Night After Night/ The Darkest Hour

I've just come back from a very pleasant evening at Booth Books, where Phil Rickman and Barbara Erskine were telling ghost stories and talking about their books.
I wore my Thorogood Pagan Bookshop tshirt, of course (as featured in Magus of Hay) - in fact, the night was so mild that I didn't really need a coat, and the windows were open upstairs in Booths.
Fictional Hallowe'ens are never so mild.
Night After Night is Phil's new book, a ghost story wrapped in a crime story, set in a haunted house in the Cotswolds which has been set up as a sort of haunted Big Brother house by a TV company. The people in the house tell ghost stories to each other, and the extract Phil chose was a Welsh ghost story where the character heard sawing sounds in the night from the workshop across the farmyard, that heralded sudden deaths.
Barbara's book is The Darkest Hour, based on her father's exploits as a World War Two fighter pilot, and is the first time she has ever really accepted the mantle of "romantic novelist" - though the next book is going to be gory, so the label doesn't stick! Most of Barbara Erskine's books feature some sort of time-slip, so there is a present day story alongside the World War Two one, and her extract concerned a teenage girl looking for a ghostly presence in the attic of her home - and when the rest of the family come home, she is nowhere to be found....
When questions were invited from the audience, the conversation ranged from ghosts to Stephen King to being labelled as Young Adult by Amazon ("but my book includes some necrophilia and they're saying it's suitable for twelve year olds!") with a discussion of the atmospheric qualities of Enid Blyton's Rub-a-Dub Mystery and her own ghost story in Five Go Off to Camp - the spook train (which was always one of my favourites). But Enid Blyton always had a rational reason behind the mystery, "usually men, with a gun and Eastern European accents," said Phil. "Some things never change."
At the end of the evening there was a special guest - Alan Watson, who wrote the songs which, in the books, were written by Lol Robinson, Merrily Watkins' boyfriend. He sang Tamworth-in-Arden, which is about a visit to Nick Drake's grave (Nick Drake was a major influence on the songs, and is mentioned often in the Merrily Watkins books), and he and Phil sang the Trackway Man, a song dedicated to Alfred Watkins the inventor (or discoverer) of ley lines. Thanks to the miracles of modern technology, a flautist from Tennessee, a violinist in Germany and a drummer who happened to be in South Africa that week were all able to contribute to the second album (and mine was one of the lonely hands which went up when they asked who had any Lol Robinson CDs).

(with accompaniment throughout the evening by Fergus the dog and his uncanny whining!)