The stories we keep for the dark half of the year

The lamp went on at half past six last night, a good twenty minutes earlier than it wanted to a fortnight ago, and I felt the pull I feel every year at exactly this turn of the calendar. Not the pull towards writing the unsettling stories, which is my trade and carries on in July as readily as in November. The pull towards reading them. There is a season for being frightened on purpose, and we are walking into it now, one early evening at a time.

Why the dark half of the year The habit is very old and it is not really ours to claim. For as long as people have gathered indoors against the cold, they have used the long evenings to tell one another things that make the back of the neck prickle. The practical root is plain enough. The light withdraws, the outdoor work thins out, and there you all are with time on your hands and a fire to sit round and a great deal of darkness pressing on the windows. But there is a second root beneath that one, and it is the interesting one. When the year tilts away from the light, something in us wants to rehearse the feeling of standing at the edge of things while we are still safely inside. We reach for the story that unsettles us precisely when the world outside has started doing it for free.

The pleasure of a safe fright People ask, not unreasonably, why a grown adult with quite enough real worries would choose to take on an invented one. The answer is that a good uncanny story is the safest practice of a genuine feeling that I know. You get the quickened pulse and the sudden keen interest in what the house is doing two rooms away, and then you close the book, and the house is only the house again. It is a rehearsal with all the danger removed and all the sensation left in. I have never had any use for the loud, wet end of the shelf, the kind that sets out to disgust you. That is easy, and it is over quickly. I want to be made watchful, not sickened. And the stories that manage it, every time, are the ones with the discipline to show you almost nothing.

The story you can see all of is over. The one you cannot is still in the room.

What earns its place So the books I take down at this time of year are the quiet ones. The old antiquarian ghost story, where a mild scholar disturbs something he should have left well alone and the horror arrives by implication and by post. The folk tale built around a rule you must not break, told so plainly that the breaking, when it comes, lands like cold water down the collar. The tale that explains nothing, apologises for nothing, and simply leaves you standing on the stairs in the dark, to do the last and worst part of the work yourself. That is where the real story lives, in any case. Not on the page at all, but in the reader afterwards, on the landing, deciding whether or not to look.

The lamp will keep creeping earlier for weeks yet, and the birds will keep knocking off sooner, and I will do what I do every autumn. Put the loud world on silent, find something that earns one honest glance at the dark landing, and read it slowly. Then turn the last page and take the enormous, ordinary comfort of a house that is, after all, only a house. That comfort is the present the fright comes wrapped around, and you cannot unwrap the one without first agreeing to the other. Best, as ever, with the hall light on.