Impossible Hauntings: Graeme Macrae Burnet and Barry Graham

Abstract

It has become something of a cliché to speak of ‘Scottish Gothic’ as though there were one country which could house a certain set of hauntings. But Scotland is, of course, a diverse country, as we have seen over many centuries in its political and religious dealings. In particular, we need to speak together of the industrial – or post-industrial – ‘heartland’ (whatever that contested term might mean) and of the hauntings that might specifically afflict those lands excluded from ‘development’ in any obvious social sense. No nation (especially a ‘stateless nation’) is unified; but in this paper I want to return to Graeme Macrae Burnet's remarkable Highlands-centred novel His Bloody Project, and place alongside it some of the prolific work of the more urban Barry Graham, who has been hailed as the successor to Stephen King. Might there be evidence here of some kinds of mutual haunting?