The Confirmed Bachelors
by Stephen Volk
(novella, Black Shuck Books, 2025)
(novella, Black Shuck Books, 2025)
(cover design Steve J. Shaw)
Order direct from the publisher
"It should be stated at the outset, for those who expect a certain kind of thing from a certain kind of tale, that, when investigating Arilda House in his capacity as a member of the Society for Psychical Research, Flaxton found no evidence, let alone proof, of a haunting. Not that he especially sought a preternatural explanation, nor did he – God forbid – leap to grasp any tenuous thread that might be clung to in that regard. Such lack of discipline would entirely go against the grain of his essentially sceptical nature. However, it must be said, and he almost did say, the place certainly looked the part…"
In the decade after the Great War, two ghosthunters - unlikely friends and colleagues - converge on a house in rural Gloucestershire to investigate the case of a haunted bedroom...
But nothing is what it seems - and the story may not be a ghost story at all...
This chapbook also includes a reprint of "The Waiting Room", a supernatural tale featuring Charles Dickens, and a specially-written Preface "Ghosthunters I Have Known", which describes the author's formative influences and his longstanding obsession with psychical research on the page or on the screen.
CONTENTS:
Preface: "Ghosthunters I Have Known"
The Waiting Room
The Confirmed Bachelors
Order direct from the publisher
"It should be stated at the outset, for those who expect a certain kind of thing from a certain kind of tale, that, when investigating Arilda House in his capacity as a member of the Society for Psychical Research, Flaxton found no evidence, let alone proof, of a haunting. Not that he especially sought a preternatural explanation, nor did he – God forbid – leap to grasp any tenuous thread that might be clung to in that regard. Such lack of discipline would entirely go against the grain of his essentially sceptical nature. However, it must be said, and he almost did say, the place certainly looked the part…"
In the decade after the Great War, two ghosthunters - unlikely friends and colleagues - converge on a house in rural Gloucestershire to investigate the case of a haunted bedroom...
But nothing is what it seems - and the story may not be a ghost story at all...
This chapbook also includes a reprint of "The Waiting Room", a supernatural tale featuring Charles Dickens, and a specially-written Preface "Ghosthunters I Have Known", which describes the author's formative influences and his longstanding obsession with psychical research on the page or on the screen.
CONTENTS:
Preface: "Ghosthunters I Have Known"
The Waiting Room
The Confirmed Bachelors
"The Confirmed Bachelors packs a novel-length emotional punch, giving us a cast of characters we care about very quickly. The underlying tone of possibility, both ghostly and physical, is glorious. Volk almost hypnotically transports us to the time of the haunted bed, and gives us some truly chilling moments" Kaaron Warren, Shirley Jackson Award-winning author of The Underhistory
"I already loved The Waiting Room, the companion story in this slim volume from Black Shuck Books, but the new piece, The Confirmed Bachelors really is something else. A beautifully observed piece of fiction that, like the best ghost stories, really isn’t about ghosts at all. The dialogue is just exquisite. The characters are drawn with depth and warmth, and the subtle sense of thwarted emotional depths really makes the ending of this delicate little story vibrate off the page. Absolutely brilliant" Simon Avery, author of Sorrowmouth
"A ghost hunt in 1920's Gloucestershire brings two psychic investigators to a supposedly haunted house. During the night they spend there, long dormant secrets are awakened and dark truths exposed in this masterfully crafted character study" Anthony Watson
"Excellent story - very moving" Alex Walters
"A slim but richly layered volume. Not for readers who want loud hauntings or easy answers... At the centre of the story are Professor Flaxton and Pomeroy (whose) dynamic is compelling, built on contrast, restraint, and an unspoken tension that deepens over the course of the investigation... Volk plays with perception and the human condition in a way that messes with your sense of reality, letting discomfort build as you start questioning what you're seeing as much as the characters do... It's the kind of book that encourages you to slow down and absorb every little detail with reflection by sitting with what's left unsaid" Sarah Graven Weir, Phantasmagoria
"Two great tales (as expected) from the consistently superb Mr Volk" Keith B Walters
"There is something so poignant in Stephen Volk’s tale of early twentieth century ghost-hunting that it haunts long after the final words have been savoured. Unusually for a ghost story, this has less to do with interventions from the supernatural - though the anticipation of an unworldly presence is built from the start - than a sense of something missing or lost, or that has never been present when it should have been. In Mark Fisher’s terms this is precisely the matter of the eerie. Yet in ‘The Confirmed Batchelors’ the most intense eeriness is to be found less in the ambience of its old house, or in the lurking resonance of a dead soldier, and more in an emotional lack within its central character, Professor Flaxton, the buttoned-down academic half of its ghost-hunting duo. Flaxton’s companion in practical research is one Pomeroy, a cool, self-promoting paranormal investigator with a direct line to the Daily Mail. Pomeroy’s suave drive to sensational exposure and Flaxton’s dry rigour rub up against each other; but whether it is a procedural irritation or a creative spark is about to be tested. Volk plays Pomeroy’s flamboyance off against Flaxton’s reserve, but the telling of the tale pulls all the time in the opposite direction, with the reader sharing Flaxton’s point of view while the extravgant and daring Pomeroy remains for his companion and us a flashy enigma, attractive but strangely unrevealing despite his extrovert character. While this imbalance in the relationship is always engaging, what really intensifies it are the subtle and suffocating details that buttress it all about; from the frayed gentility of the former rectory Arilda House, to the staid vulnerability of its owner, Mrs Dulcie Willet, to the surrounding landscape with its church set in a trespass on a tumulus, to the precocious energy of ‘over-dramatic’ twelve year old Lizzy-May. Every detail of the house, while resisting gothic portentousness, builds a variant nervousness with its desktop barometer “marked ‘stormy’ to ‘variable’”, Mrs Willet’s unnervingly pale skin and the diagrammatical scrabbling of mice in the walls, climaxing in the “bucking” bed that has brought the investigators to the house. In this bed Flaxton and Pomeroy sit together, in pinstripe suit and camel coat and stiff collars, to have their photograph taken; an image that will have some afterlife (and skilfully, the publishers have paired ‘The Confirmed Bachelors’ with Stephen Volk’s story ‘The Waiting Room’ which also deals in representation and haunting; not to mention a fascinating short preface by Volk on his brushes with ghosthunters in fiction ). It is only as night falls – after feasting on “sliced peaches from a tin and evaporated milk” – that the investigation truly begins as the details of their own circumstances grow taut around the two men. We learn that although they first met at a lecture on “Gurney’s ‘Phantoms Of the Living’”, they were already “aware of each other’s presence beforehand, as of a lingering ghost or offstage character waiting to enter”. Pomeroy and Flaxton climb into contrasting night apparel, and Pomeroy seals the windows and door edges with tape “in order to detect tampering”. Taped in, when Flaxton lights his pipe in bed the light of “the struck match touching the Revelation in his pipe lit up his face in the gloom”, and a “valley” in the centre of the bed’s mattress deepens.
As to what emerges from the valley in the mattress… you will need to read ‘The Confirmed Batchelors’, for its denouement is every bit as nuanced as the décor of Arilda House itself (and I am not going to spoil things by writing of it here). So, why not pay it a visit?" Phil Smith, Mytho
"I already loved The Waiting Room, the companion story in this slim volume from Black Shuck Books, but the new piece, The Confirmed Bachelors really is something else. A beautifully observed piece of fiction that, like the best ghost stories, really isn’t about ghosts at all. The dialogue is just exquisite. The characters are drawn with depth and warmth, and the subtle sense of thwarted emotional depths really makes the ending of this delicate little story vibrate off the page. Absolutely brilliant" Simon Avery, author of Sorrowmouth
"A ghost hunt in 1920's Gloucestershire brings two psychic investigators to a supposedly haunted house. During the night they spend there, long dormant secrets are awakened and dark truths exposed in this masterfully crafted character study" Anthony Watson
"Excellent story - very moving" Alex Walters
"A slim but richly layered volume. Not for readers who want loud hauntings or easy answers... At the centre of the story are Professor Flaxton and Pomeroy (whose) dynamic is compelling, built on contrast, restraint, and an unspoken tension that deepens over the course of the investigation... Volk plays with perception and the human condition in a way that messes with your sense of reality, letting discomfort build as you start questioning what you're seeing as much as the characters do... It's the kind of book that encourages you to slow down and absorb every little detail with reflection by sitting with what's left unsaid" Sarah Graven Weir, Phantasmagoria
"Two great tales (as expected) from the consistently superb Mr Volk" Keith B Walters
"There is something so poignant in Stephen Volk’s tale of early twentieth century ghost-hunting that it haunts long after the final words have been savoured. Unusually for a ghost story, this has less to do with interventions from the supernatural - though the anticipation of an unworldly presence is built from the start - than a sense of something missing or lost, or that has never been present when it should have been. In Mark Fisher’s terms this is precisely the matter of the eerie. Yet in ‘The Confirmed Batchelors’ the most intense eeriness is to be found less in the ambience of its old house, or in the lurking resonance of a dead soldier, and more in an emotional lack within its central character, Professor Flaxton, the buttoned-down academic half of its ghost-hunting duo. Flaxton’s companion in practical research is one Pomeroy, a cool, self-promoting paranormal investigator with a direct line to the Daily Mail. Pomeroy’s suave drive to sensational exposure and Flaxton’s dry rigour rub up against each other; but whether it is a procedural irritation or a creative spark is about to be tested. Volk plays Pomeroy’s flamboyance off against Flaxton’s reserve, but the telling of the tale pulls all the time in the opposite direction, with the reader sharing Flaxton’s point of view while the extravgant and daring Pomeroy remains for his companion and us a flashy enigma, attractive but strangely unrevealing despite his extrovert character. While this imbalance in the relationship is always engaging, what really intensifies it are the subtle and suffocating details that buttress it all about; from the frayed gentility of the former rectory Arilda House, to the staid vulnerability of its owner, Mrs Dulcie Willet, to the surrounding landscape with its church set in a trespass on a tumulus, to the precocious energy of ‘over-dramatic’ twelve year old Lizzy-May. Every detail of the house, while resisting gothic portentousness, builds a variant nervousness with its desktop barometer “marked ‘stormy’ to ‘variable’”, Mrs Willet’s unnervingly pale skin and the diagrammatical scrabbling of mice in the walls, climaxing in the “bucking” bed that has brought the investigators to the house. In this bed Flaxton and Pomeroy sit together, in pinstripe suit and camel coat and stiff collars, to have their photograph taken; an image that will have some afterlife (and skilfully, the publishers have paired ‘The Confirmed Bachelors’ with Stephen Volk’s story ‘The Waiting Room’ which also deals in representation and haunting; not to mention a fascinating short preface by Volk on his brushes with ghosthunters in fiction ). It is only as night falls – after feasting on “sliced peaches from a tin and evaporated milk” – that the investigation truly begins as the details of their own circumstances grow taut around the two men. We learn that although they first met at a lecture on “Gurney’s ‘Phantoms Of the Living’”, they were already “aware of each other’s presence beforehand, as of a lingering ghost or offstage character waiting to enter”. Pomeroy and Flaxton climb into contrasting night apparel, and Pomeroy seals the windows and door edges with tape “in order to detect tampering”. Taped in, when Flaxton lights his pipe in bed the light of “the struck match touching the Revelation in his pipe lit up his face in the gloom”, and a “valley” in the centre of the bed’s mattress deepens.
As to what emerges from the valley in the mattress… you will need to read ‘The Confirmed Batchelors’, for its denouement is every bit as nuanced as the décor of Arilda House itself (and I am not going to spoil things by writing of it here). So, why not pay it a visit?" Phil Smith, Mytho
Basil Radford and Naunton Wayne as Flaxton and Pomeroy in the 1947 film of The Confirmed Bachelors
