The excellent Manchester Review has published a story of mine today (actually it's a compressed chapter from my next novel, but works as a story), which you can read here. The book is set largely in Romania, but opens in this actual house on the north Devon coast, a building we would try to break into as kids, regale ghost stories to each other in the grounds. A guesthouse in Victorian times, it has fallen into steady disrepair since the 70s, the Atlantic encroaching a little more each year. Buildings serve well a narrative, whether as allegory or motif, or as characters themselves, imbued as they are with memories and, in this case, folkloric charm. When abandoned (although an elderly woman still lived in a few of the rooms here until recently), such houses seem to occupy that liminal space between the beautiful and the haunted.

Anyway, hope you enjoy the story. OK, perhaps not the right word, but we write what we know.