I love the album Ghost Stories, especially the song“Ghost Story.” The bits about being unseen, being little more than a whisper remind me that ghosts, conjured or otherwise, are always with us. My hometown is littered with ghosts. Mapping that to fiction, in THE TIN BOX ghosts are not Casper-like figures but a presence created by absence, an echo. Sara senses her mother’s filmy presence draping the back of the sofa like an ancient serpent. Such an image requires patience with uncertainty. In The Man Who Saw Through Time (1969), Loren Eiseley writes that we are more likely to accept the revision of almost anything than the way we see the physical world, suggesting I think, that we see how the world works in terms of certainty when almost nothing is certain. Whether haunted by the loss of family, the loss of childhood, a lost love, incorporating elements of the supernatural into reality allows writers to create a sense of worlds colliding, of this universe being off kilter, of flying too close to the sun, of creeping under toadstools or, as the Coldplay song puts it, trying to walk through walls.