Goodnight from Catewynd Point, where Kip Bartlett is keeping watch in hope of glimpsing the ghost ship SS Erotic Charlotte. Goodnight from Frankie Fairburn, explaining to his nephew that if you pay taxes to Faery you don’t have to involve Her Majesty’s lot. Goodnight from Hookland.

I believe this is a winner in the #goth eye spy game - crow on gravestone as seen through a rain bejewelled spiderweb.

An entry from the #HooklandEncyclopædia, this time on Dracula Buses and the censorship of #horror films. Also, context for later tonight.

The land is long memory. The land is layers of story. Its ghost soil cracks and releases spirits. Our navigations across it will always bring encounters with the strange. – #CLNolan

Goodnight from Jennie Hoar, feeling the swell of nausea every time she contemplates her secret dealings with the Grinning Man being exposed. Goodnight from Georgie Ash, learning the divinatory language of thrown bones instead of doing her French homework. Goodnight from Hookland.

Ashcourt Docks nick is one of the most haunted places I know. It is more than the deaths in custody, the abject despair and grief it's seen. There's something about it that traps pain and anger in its bricks. I feel sorry for every copper and villain crossing its threshold. – #DICallaghan

@cultauthor.bsky.social Rust never peeps (sorry) #photography (phone snap)

The witch walking is a witch having a conversation with the land. A chart of the paths she takes is telling of genii locorum, places where the ghost soil speaks loudest. Her feet scuff up stories, her feet scuff up spirits. Each navigation is sorcery. – #EmilyCBanting, 1982 #WitchSky

Worn not warn, but you knew exactly what I meant and there is no need to be a pisspuffin about it.

It is Hookland. There is no ‘spooky season’. Spooky is the county’s default setting because it is the English gothic, the English strange. The weird is not a costume to be warn only once a year.

The longer you spend in the county, the easier it is to recognise a Wood Sprite's home tree. Even without offerings, there's a palpable sense of being watched, an atmosphere of potential ambush. What some Hooklanders call: 'an air of ancient unease'. – #MattAdams

I am terrible when I am in hedgehog mode. I am a terrible friend when I am all hibernation and spines. Forgive me. I will try better.

London responds to what feels like the last hot, sun-blessed day of the year with a slight de-armouring. More nods of hello. More chatter. Get your good cheer now mate because it’s going to be an effing harsh winter.

Not that Hookland is predominantly about advice for better living, but READ MORE! LEAEN MORE! is proper ghost wisdom.

@reesmf.bsky.social so good to see you here!

Hookland is an infection. Even on the Victoria line it comes unbidden. Carbon monoxide phantoms. Souls trapped in cathode ray tubes. A thousand ghosts wanting to be heard.

Don’t speak gif. Don’t speak young folk/modern hieroglyph. Not ever going to. I am possessed by the spirit of an Edwardian curmudgeon as almost everyone who knows me knows. If you think reducing discourse to memes hasn’t had a role in getting us into this shite you haven’t been paying attention.

I approve of language being haunted. There are two related words in Hookland dialect of which I am fond. Gastgate – a door one instinctively knows leads to a ghost-troubled place and gastboden – a tingling across the psychic skin foretelling a coming of phantoms. – #CLNolan #WOTD

As many British men of a certain age had to discover, quoting bits of Monty Python is not a substitute for a personality.

The witch will ignore paths, the witch will climb over walls. Her green communion with the wood refuses artificial impediments. In her court, spiritual permissions trump the claims of those who arrogantly proclaim land as owned. – #EmilyCBanting, 1982 #WitchSky

At the withered end of the year, where summer is reduced to a dried memory, grass whispers on behalf of the ghost soil. The land's nameless spirits roam old paths across the heath. This is the season of dead alchemy. – #DAKilroy

Mrs. S. complaining about a ship in Hookland being called the S.S. Erotic Charlotte mainly on the grounds that is in an Australian ghost grain ship and Australian's are more sensible than the English when it comes to naming ships.

Timeline cleanse.

Goodnight from DC Adeel Mirza, unwilling to take at face value Ben Hobbs’ witness report that the burning car he found dumped in Hesk Woods was set alight by alien space lasers. Goodnight from Hal Adcock, whittling Marsh Ape figurines as an act of apotropaism. Goodnight from Hookland.

I have had an idea for a Hookland radio play. I think I will have to lie down till it passes.

This view used to be a pub, beer delivered by horses on Tuesday mornings. I have lived long enough to see it become a science fiction. I feel ghosted by this now, by the absences of place.

1/2: Salem’s Lot - Chapter Four (parts 5 and 6). This is one of my favourite parts of the whole book, so perfect it could almost be a short story. The removal men have to move some boxes, essentially. It is obvious to the reader, but not to the men, that one of these boxes must be a vampiric coffin.

Mug of Lapsang souchong poured from a teapot with a Bagpuss cover to wash down a slice of saffron loaf. A rare moment of cosy against all the pain and pisspuffinry. Not as escape, but as a reminder to take grace when it is offered.

When people say Churchillian, I wonder if they mean it in the sense of how 1911 plan to place a 150,000 ‘mentally defective people’ in forced-labour camps?

Day considerably worse for aled-up far right crowds and aled-up and bitter in defeat West Ham fans (I realise this might be a West Ham default setting).

I only do forewords for work I love and people I respect, so it was easy to do one for @raynewman.bsky.social

@deedeechainey.bsky.social So lovely to see you here.

"...this fear was childlike, dreamy. There was no reference point to it. A house was a house...There was no reason, really no reason, to feel that each splintered crack was exhaling its own chalky aroma of evil... Ghosts? He didn't believe in ghosts." Salem's Lot 4.5 #PhantomsFriday #SalemSeptember

one for anyone following along with #SalemSeptember

Ghosted by stories ... #SalemSeptember

Goodnight from Gemma Ash, standing on Goose Bridge as she lowers a bottle-trapped minor demon into the River Stannis’ rolling ink. Goodnight from Blaxwich Pier, emptied by the end of summer season, but still haunted by the mocking laugh of Mr. Punch. Goodnight from Hookland.

I'll forgo the ghosts of grand house avenues – all driverless coaches, headless horses in finest tack – for lonely lane phantoms. Narrow paths that refuse space for spirit avoidance, routes where the only way home is shade-troubled. This is my haunted hodology. – #CJosiffe #Ghosts

Mrs. S.: "Is Peter Hammill related to @markhamillofficial.bsky.social?" Me: "I don't think so, possibly in a vague sense that all Hammillls might be related to Hamills." Mrs. S.: "The singing doesn't sound like he could be related to Mark Hamill."

Mrs. S. has finished learning "spooky words" in Italian. Not sure yet whether this means she will be telling me and the cat Scooby-Doo and Hookland stories in Italian again.

Refuse to manufacture faux grief. Refuse all performative emotion. Refuse to feel shame for lacking any prayers.

Goodnight from Rob Bale, regretting taking a dose of water lily soaked in wine now he’s having Blakean visions of giants and wandering hill figures. Goodnight from Jill Burr, knitting a doll in the image of Mrs. Maybush, her nemesis in Barwell’s Rural Women’s Guild. Goodnight from Hookland.

Mrs. S. read tonight’s Hookland Goodnight and sighed: “You’ve done that haven’t you?” Guilty. Always guilty.

Maybe it is the sense of death approaching, but Mrs. S. asked if I ever wanted a statue of me put up in my hometown. I have explained this is never going to happen, I would never ever want this to happen and Hadleigh is so full of scrotes any statue would be pissed on and pulled down regularly.

#SalemSeptember I think King's exceptionally good at writing about loss, and about the way people sleepwalk towards its inevitability, unprepared in the moment. Which I guess is why he's so good at writing everyday life, because what is that but a million ways to deny the existence of death? 3/3

Even in death, the rich cannot give up their grand houses, cannot stop playing their hierarchical games. Ostentation unto the tomb seems terribly tawdry. No part of my imagined afterlife involves having to remind people of any wealth or status I enjoyed in life. – #CLNolan

From 101 ways to say IDGAF: 'Floyd can crap in his hat and wear it backward for all of me,' Parkins said. (Salem's Lot, chapter 2.3) #SalemSeptember

Remember when you were a kid and you hadn’t heard of labels like B-movies or genre and only judged things on whether you liked the story, the look and the actors? Keep hold of that in everything you write. Screw all the fences they try to enclose you with, just write your thing in your voice.

Today's thoughts for #SalemSeptember. Auguries of darkness begin to flock.