• Selected by Lauren O’Donoghue

Like ‘The Breakthrough’, ‘Foreboding’ is set primarily in a workplace—in this case Kenilworth Castle, where the main character, Khalid, works as a security guard. I’m always interested in depictions of work and labour in fiction, and I think they’re particularly fascinating as sites of haunting in ghost stories. We often wonder why inhabitants of haunted houses don’t just leave. When your job depends on staying right where you are, that question answers itself.

‘Foreboding’ feels like a very traditional ghost story until it doesn’t. Taking place in a nine-hundred-year-old castle, where “queens had danced and plots had been laid and kings had been insulted”, it’s easy to think that we know where the story is going. When the ghost arrives in earnest, however, the truth proves far more devastating. It’s a deft narrative volta, the rather quaint terror of the haunted house paling against the tangible horrors of war. It made me think about the term haunted, and how often we use it to speak of trauma, as well as ghosts.

First published in Eight Ghosts: The English Heritage Book of New Ghost Stories, September Publishing, 2018. Read online at Lithub here