Crossover Cover: An English Ghost Story

Kim Newman's latest novel has ties to his other work, though there are no references to any works by other people that I could find. The dysfunctional Naremore family moves into the Hollow, a haunted house once owned by Louise Magellan Teazle, the author of the Weezie books (inspired by her childhood in the Hollow) and the Drearcliff Grange series. The family reads a chapter about the Hollow in Catriona Kaye’s Ghost Stories of the West Country. The chapter states that the Hollow’s “ghost trees” are described in a series of journal entries penned in 1879 by Timothy Bannerman, parson of the nearby village of Alder. In 1923, Kaye spent a night at the hollow in the company of the trance medium Irene Dobson and the psychic investigator Edwin Winthrop. Drearcliff Grange is from Newman’s novel upcoming novel Kentish Glory. Catriona Kaye and Edwin Winthrop are lovers who occasionally do contract work for the Diogenes Club (originally from the Sherlock Holmes stories), as seen in other tales by Newman. The Reverend Timothy Bannerman, the village of Alder, and Irene Dobson are from Newman’s novel Jago.