Monthly Archives: February 2018

Strange Coincidences


In 2001 I wrote a supernatural ghost story called ‘Requiem’, and I eventually published it in my 2010 short story collection ‘Beyond Twilight’.  It was about a ghost hunter called Nick Weston who stays at a supposedly haunted house in a strange little village. Nick is haunted by the death of his wife, and is actually a sceptic when it comes to the supernatural. He’s very much a hero of the sort James Herbert would have written, but as the story progresses he becomes an unreliable narrator.

I noted recently that the BBC had made a supernatural series called ‘Requiem’. The fact that the title was the same was not unusual, as many words and titles get re-used in different works of fiction, across varying media. The first coincidence was that it was also the title of a supernatural ghost story narrative, like mine was. The hero is a heroine in this case, a cello-playing young woman. Then I read a little more about it, that the woman is haunted by past loss, and that she ends up in a strange little Welsh village with weird locals, and stays at a supposedly haunted house, and she’s an unreliable narrator. Oh, and there’s a character called Nick in it. So…quite a few coincidences.
