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ARTICLE: A MEIKLE MYTHOS?

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Several of the stories in my new collection THE GHOST CLUB fit into my ongoing Sigils and Totems mythos.

It’s a simple enough concept.

There are houses like this all over the world. Most people only know of them from whispered stories over campfires;
tall tales told to scare the unwary. But some, those who suffer… some know better. They are drawn to the places where
what ails them can be eased.

If you have the will, the fortitude, you can peer into another life, where the dead are not gone, where you can see
that they thrive and go on, in the dreams that stuff is made of.

There it is in a nutshell. There are houses where people can go to get in touch with their dead loved ones.

But this gives me lots of things to play with. To even get inside a room, you need a sigil; a tattoo or carving on your
skin, and a totem, a memento of your loved one. Then there’s the fact that your loved one might be a parallel
universe version rather than the one you actually know.

And where do these houses come from? What’s behind the walls? How do they work? Why do they work? And who chooses the concierges who run them? Or fixes them when they don’t work?

So I’ve got all that to play with, plus the fact that the houses can exist anywhere, at any time. They’re like lots
of boxy, multi-faceted Tardis, spread across space time, places and situations into which I can hook in characters
and stories.

I think I’ve stumbled into something that could keep me busy for a few years.

When it came to writing THE GHOST CLUB stories, I thought it would be fun to have some of the famous writers stumble into this mythos, as if it’s something that has always been out there, on the fringes of storytelling since stories were first told.

So I have Bram Stoker telling of strange doings in a house in Whitechapel, a tale that is the most directly linked in
the mythos of them all, I have Rudyard Kipling’s army officer stumbling into a cellar in the mountains of India
where a house is in the process of being ‘born’, and I have Henry James telling of a chess set that may, or may
not, have come from another such house, and which will turn up soon in a later story of mine that’s going into the
whole mythos in more depth.

These stories add to the novel, three novellas, and another handful of tales that are already published, and there is
more to come.

I’m Willie Meikle, and this is my mythos.

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William Meikle is a Scottish writer, now living in Canada, with over twenty novels published in the genre press and more than 300 short story credits in thirteen countries. He has books available from a variety of publishers and his work has appeared in a large number of professional anthologies and magazines. He lives in Newfoundland with whales, bald eagles and icebergs for company. When he’s not writing he drinks beer, plays guitar, and dreams of fortune and glory. Willie Meikle on Amazon