Yesterday I attended ‘Tales of the Weird: An Autumnal Festival‘, the British Library’s annual encounter with strange, uncanny and chilling fiction. In recent months, through the pursuit of my art (and life in general), I have been drawn more and more to stories of this nature – specifically with regard to place – so the event was an ideal opportunity for me to find out more and discover fruitful new avenues to wander.
I don’t intend to give a blow-by-blow account of the day; rather, I’d like to home in on aspects of the talks that fed my own interests. By the time I returned home a lot had crystallised for me around my art, Tarot, and what drives my different activities, and I emerged with newfound clarity around how to start articulating this to others. That said, I’m still digesting everything, and have a lot to explore, so this article is more a scattered assortment of observations rather than any kind of fully formed manifesto!
One thing I realised was that, across the day, the conversations touched on stories as experienced by almost the full range of our five senses. The written word (a visual experience in its own way) was, of course, the main focus of the discussions. However, it was fascinating, in the panel on Mervyn Peake and Gormenghast, to hear that Peake’s writing was considered almost ‘painterly’ in its use of language and imagery. The author Joanne Harris was a contributor here, and she described how the use of specific colours (lime green in particular was mentioned) helped build the atmosphere as much as any words forming a logical sense pattern. I had not previously been aware that Peake himself was also an artist, illustrating his own work and that of others, so this adds a new dimension to his writing.
The sound of Peake’s language was also highlighted, not least in his character names (Prunesquallor, Sepulchrave, Flay, and so on), adding to the visual imagery to create what might be considered almost a symphony of music and colour, the sensory experience of his text washing over one in a way that is perhaps more akin to the sensual image-making of poetry than to the linear progression of a novel. Then, considering sound from a different angle, the session on ‘Haunted Audio’ by the presenters of the Broken Veil podcast (Will Maclean and Joel Morris) covered the strange noises that can be used to assist paranormal storytelling via an audio format. In these cases, because of the complete absence of the visual, sound is what must be relied upon to convey what is happening; and here the absence of sound can convey as much as sound itself. Maclean and Morris cited the writer & cultural theorist Mark Fisher with his observation that “The sensation of the eerie occurs either when there is something present where there should be nothing, or there is nothing present when there should be something” [1]. And of course it goes without saying that we have a long tradition of oral storytelling, from the days around campfires in the dark, before anything was ever committed to print.
In case you are beginning to wonder where ‘smell’ and ‘touch’ might figure in to how we experience story… It was a revelation to learn that Harris is (I am going to use the word) gifted with synaesthesia: the condition where the senses intersect. Harris’s particular variant of this is that, for her, colours trigger scents; so when she reads Peake’s text, the liberal use of colours in its imagery enables her to inhale the particular aromas each one evokes. It is also worth noting that the smell of an old book delivers a physical sensation to the reader that an e-book cannot. And touch? Maclean and Morris addressed this too, with reference to psychometry, “the belief that one can obtain knowledge of an object’s history through mere physical contact with it” [2]; which connects with the Stone Tape theory, wherein it is claimed “that ghosts and hauntings occur when traumatic events are imprinted on certain stones or other materials and are subsequently replayed” [2]. And what is a haunting, if not a story being replayed, again and again, over time?
Taste is the one sense for which I haven’t discovered a connection with stories (although it is possible someone else’s version of synaesthesia will provide this). However, the wealth of associations above strongly suggest a case for story as an intensely embodied experience – and I think this comes across most convincingly when story is also connected with place. The Stone Tape theory, for instance, relates to the concept of ‘place memory’; and the genre of folk horror is liberally strewn with hauntings: the stories that recur in specific places when new individuals arrive to re-trigger past experiences. New bodies, same souls…?
And it is this that leads me on to my main point of enquiry: the connection between psyche and place. I have become increasingly interested in stories that look at an individual’s psychological connection with a location they have perhaps only lately come to know or inhabit. I suspect this is because I have recently come to recognise just how affected I myself am by my environment. When I was living in Lincolnshire over the summer, the artwork I produced was predominantly images featuring my own shadow, in very simply composed collages along with the rural landscape; this spoke to my feelings of ‘just passing through’, ‘not really belonging’, and ‘figuring out who I really was behind everyone else’s expectations of me’. Prior to that, in Newport, I had made a number of collages that mashed up the urban and the rural in a much ‘busier’ approach, with lights, signs, symbols, words, reflections and images; and since I have come to live in Worthing I have gone on to make a few more of these. It seems that when I am in an urban environment (which I can often find quite overstimulating) I make work that reflects this, as opposed to my more contemplative works from my period ‘out of time’ in the countryside.
With this in mind it was absolutely fascinating to attend the talk yesterday by horror writer Ramsey Campbell, interviewed by Jeremy Dyson (of League of Gentlemen fame). I had not heard of Campbell before, but was delighted to discover that he shared my interest in ‘disordered minds’ (as he put it), in his case likely due to the fact that his mother had suffered from schizophrenia. I managed to chip in to the Q&A at the end of the session, and came away with several further recommendations for novelists who explore themes of psyche + place – and I would like to stress at this point, again reflecting my own experience, that I am not just talking about the popular perception of folk horror where unsuspecting individuals encounter a harsh, remote rural landscape that bites back; the environment in question can just as easily be a small village community (such as in The Wicker Man) or even a lone building (The Shining*, The Haunting of Hill House*). The key is what each individual brings to that location and the personal relationship they form with it. (On reviewing this article for a last-minute spell- and sense-check, I am now also put in mind of An American Werewolf in London, which strikes me as covering pretty much ‘all of the above’, and which I clearly need to revisit!)
Another intriguing angle to consider is that, while psyche can reflect place, place can also reflect psyche. Yesterday this seemed to be nowhere so apparent as in the case of Gormenghast. Harris noted that the first book in the trilogy, Titus Groan*, was published in 1946, around the same time as The Collected Works of C. G. Jung were being compiled for publication; and she posited that the castle is like a brain, possibly even a metaphor for depression. Each character could be said, in her view, to represent a different psychological condition; and there is an extremely surreal quality to the work, a reliance on ‘dream logic’, which indicates an awareness of (and interest in) the preoccupations that arose from Sigmund Freud’s investigations into the subconscious and dream states. I have not yet mentioned the first panel of the day, with Lucie McKnight Hardy, Oyinkan Braithwaite and Sarah Clegg, but in their lively conversation, one question that (I think) all agreed on was that the best weird tales do not make it clear whether the issue at hand is ‘psychological’ or ‘supernatural’: it is left open. In other words, what is real and what is merely imagined? What is a ‘pattern’ and what is a ‘haunting’? And is it even possible – or necessary – to distinguish between the two? I hate to quote JK Rowling for a variety of reasons, but these lines from Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows* [3] have always resonated with me:
“Is this real? Or has this been happening inside my head?”
…
“Of course it is happening inside your head, Harry, but why on earth should that mean that it is not real?”
I will conclude my meanderings from yesterday with a quote from ‘Haunted Audio’ that really landed with me: “All storytelling is virtual reality.” All stories are, by definition, ‘made up’ – but they still have the capacity to tell us vital truths about our lives, the world, and our experience within it. Another word that cropped up repeatedly throughout the day was ‘hallucinatory’, which also feels highly relevant: a hallucination may come from our imagination, but to what extent does that make it ‘unreal’? Our imagination generates ideas and visions, as well as nightmares and fantasies, but if we can translate those liminal manifestations into physical effects (such as a piece of art, a moment of self-realisation, the healing of a relationship), does it matter whence they originate?
And to return finally to my musings on psyche + place… I believe our relationship with our environment is where we can truly tune in to the stories that the world wants us to find – the stories of our selves, our purpose, and our sense of alignment with something greater than we know – and, through this recognition, the ability to change our story if it has, up to now, been limiting us. The body is what enlivens us in our own time, the soul is what connects us to what has gone before (and what will come after), and through connecting both body & soul to the spirits of place & story we can find a way forward that will take us beyond what we can currently imagine.
References
[1] Fisher, M. (2016). The weird and the eerie. London: Repeater Books.*
[2] Wikipedia. (2023). Stone tape theory. [online] Available at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stone_Tape_Theory [Accessed 1 Nov. 2026].
[3] Rowling, J.K. (2007). Harry Potter and the deathly hallows. London: Bloomsbury Publishing Plc.
Further bibliography
Mcknight Hardy, L. (2026). Night babies. John Murray Publishers.*
Braithwaite, O. (2025). Cursed daughters. Atlantic Books.*
Clegg, S. (2026). Perilous enchantment: The true history of faeries. Granta Books.*
Campbell, R. and Dyson, J. (2026). The show goes on. British Library.*
*Disclosure: If you buy books through these links, I may earn a commission from Bookshop.org, whose fees support independent bookshops.