Episode 48: The Dining Room Ghost by Megan Taylor

Megan TaylorMegan is a British author, who has four novels, the latest being https://amzn.to/2z94akj (We Wait) UK link and https://amzn.to/2XQOFI1 (We Wait) USA Link Megan lives in Nottingham, England. She teaches Creative Writing workshops has published four novels: We Wait (the latest, which is a haunted house story), The Woman Under the Ground which is a collection of short stories, The Lives of Ghosts and **The Dawning. They are all very well reviewed and there is great praise for the writing. In the interview we talked about a love for the short story form and for ghost stories in general, though not all of Megan's work is in the ghost/horror genre. The Dining Room GhostIt was good being able to talk to the author about what she intended in the story rather than me guessing what long dead writers meant in theirs.  The Dining Room Ghost was partly inspired by Megan half-seeing something when overtired coming down the stairs with her young baby. We talked about the silent woman ghosts, often with long hair, sometimes drowned that keep cropping up in horror but she said she wanted the ghost to be the silence and quiet in a house of screaming babies and the busy head of the young mother. The mother seems to want silence and peace above all, and there is just one way to get it! There is ambiguity about the ghost: is it a ghost or is it a post natal psychosis? In that there is a strong pedigree of ghost stories with unreliable narrators; The Yellow Wallpaper being one and The Horlaanother among the stories we have read out.  This is a theme in our culture as a whole -- are people who see ghosts simply mad, or do they reveal a whole other realm by their seeing what the rest of us cannot? We talked about a Freudian interpretation where the ghost is a dissociated part of the narrator -- her Shadow if you like (though that is a Jungian term that Freud would not have liked!). The emotions embodied in the ghost, murderous waiting