Stephen Carver – Author | Teacher

‘A little place just outside Diss’ – A Ghost Story

‘If there is an afterlife,’ I remember my mother saying one day, ‘then how come people always look so sad when they die?’

Back then, I wasn’t in a position to answer. To be honest, I didn’t want to know. I was already regretting raising the issue with her at all. It had come up again at school, and all the teachers there just seemed to take it for granted. I thought it sounded reassuring, especially as my Dad was already there, wherever ‘there’ was. Mum, though, was having none of it. Radicalised by the sixties, she didn’t approve of RE classes or Christian assemblies, and it was only because Grandad had convinced her it would cause me a lot of bother if she stormed up there and demanded I be exempted that saved me from humiliation. ‘Go and talk to the old man about it, if you must,’ she advised, returning to the washing up. ‘He believes in all that old bollocks.’

Featured Articles

The Fall of the House of Usher

Sixty-three years after Corman’s ground-breaking movie reinvented Poe and the American Gothic, Mike Flanagan has done it again with his remarkable reimagining of The Fall of the House of Usher. And the critical and commercial response has been much the same as it was in 1960. The Fall of the House of Usher has gone viral.

Shark Alley

A Victorian online serial: 'Adrift in the Atlantic with a corrupt Tory M.P. Surrounded by sharks. Low on booze. Who says history is boring?'

The Author Who Outsold Dickens

My latest book, published by Pen & Sword: 'Ainsworth’s story is also the story of the development of the English novel, perhaps just as much as that story belongs to Dickens. But it is a story rarely told; at least until now...'