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focus on these mysterious, faintly sinister balloons, of whose origins I’m honestly unsure (except that, due to the threat of their flying away should you relax your grip on them, balloons have been a locus of anxiety for me since I was a small child and one escaped up into the sky at the amusement park my parents had taken me to). I could see them clearly in my mind’s eye, these large, papery spheres, the creases in whose coverings were clearly visible. The temporal setting of the story suggested a Henry-Jamesian writer as the protagonist, as well as the story’s use of spiritualism (it is true that New York’s Hudson Valley was a center of spiritualist activity during the 1850s). I originally had it in mind to write a more conventionally structured story, but I stalled on that version not too far into it, and the story remained in a state of partial completion until it occurred to me that I might approach its material in a less conventional way, after which, the story spilled out of me in a couple of weeks. A couple of last-minute edits, and the story was done.

—JOHN LANGAN

John Harwood

John Harwood was born in Hobart, Tasmania, where he grew up in a house full of books, including numerous collections of ghost stories, an interest that would resurface many years later in his first novel, The Ghost Writer. He was educated at the Friends’ School and the University of Tasmania, where he read English and philosophy, before going on to Cambridge as a graduate student.

The Ghost Writer (first published by Jonathan Cape in 2004) won the International Horror Guild’s First Novel Award for Outstanding Achievement in Horror and Dark Fantasy, and the “Children of the Night” Award for Best Gothic Novel of 2004, from the Dracula Society of Great Britain. The Séance, a dark mystery set in late Victorian England, was published in 2008; it won the Aurealis Award for Best Horror Novel of 2008. Both novels are published in the United States by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.

JOHN HARWOOD

Face to Face

IT WAS, I think, the last Christmas of the old century; at any rate it was certainly at Reginald Carstairs’ great barracks of a place down in Surrey that my friend Maurice Trevelyan and I were sitting up late; so late that, excepting the bishop, we had the drawing room fire entirely to ourselves. And since the bishop was, as usual, sound asleep, he made an ideal chaperone. Nobody seemed to know what he was, or had been, bishop of; I very much doubt whether he knew himself, for he was so old and venerable that he woke only long enough to dine, imbibe a glass or two of port, and settle himself back into his favourite armchair. He was invariably asleep in it when the last guest went upstairs, no matter how late; but someone must have put him to bed, for his chair was always empty in the mornings.

Not that we required a chaperone: I was, as everybody knew, simply a married woman whose husband never went out, and Maurice was equally well established in the character of a forty-five-year-old bachelor of quiet habits and modest means. He had remained unmarried, it was rumoured, because of a youthful attachment, prematurely ended by the death of the woman to whose memory he remained devoted. It was not a subject I had ever raised with him, for Maurice hated to be quizzed over his personal life. I had divined this early on, in fact on the very day we were introduced in the office of the review he was then editing. Some acquaintance was chaffing him about a supposed indiscretion; I saw Maurice recoil; he saw my discomfort on his behalf, and a current of sympathy was set flowing between us. The review, to which I contributed a tale or two, lasted less than a year before its patron abandoned it, but our friendship was by then a settled thing.

Some may wonder, if personal matters were excluded, what on earth we had to talk about, to which the answer is: everything under the sun, but more particularly anything and everything that either of us had ever read or written or, in his case, dreamed of writing, for I doubt there was ever a poet with