In 1977, the literary scholar Julia Briggs published Night Visitors: The Rise and Fall of the English Ghost Story. ‘A horror that is effective for thirty pages’, observed Briggs, ‘can seldom be sustained for three hundred.’ Coming in at just over four hundred pages, Simon Wroe’s third novel, Ghost Month, doesn’t do much in the way of raising the hairs on the back of our necks, or even mildly unsettling us. A sensible technical decision, perhaps. But anyone expecting even a few otherworldly chills ought to prepare for something more mundane. 

The novel’s premise is simple: each September, the dead return en masse to the world of the living and mill around, mute but fully visible, until the month is over. Police await an uptick in crime as the protracted Day of the Dead approaches, triggering ‘moral panic’ and ‘endless public disorder’. Announcements on the Underground advise taking extra care amid the suddenly increased passenger numbers. Five years on from the first appearance of the spectral guests, though, most Londoners – all the action of the novel unfolds in the city – have become habituated to them. Jane, a schoolteacher, reflects that there ‘ought to be something astonishing about all this, it ought to fry the brain circuits seeing phantoms manifest. But a person can get used to anything.’

Although seemingly unbothered by its metaphysical implications, Jane nonetheless dreads the annual visit from her late mother. In life, unaware of her daughter’s sexuality, her mother had ‘spoken to Jane endlessly of marriage and children’; every haunting season, and despite her better instincts, Jane feels obliged to hire an imitation