![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() Sounds and sights which were ambiguous and could be real, hallucinatory or at least inexplicable – like Scrooge’s swinging bell. A ghost, atmosphere, weather, an old house, preferably isolated. I listed what I thought should be the basic ingredients. A Christmas Carol is longer, like Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw, but they are not full-length novels, so wondered if I could write one of those myself, for fun. I read every one I could find, but as I grew up and became a writer, I discovered that they were almost all short. I read Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol aged nine, and that bell, together with the door knocker that turned into a man’s face, and “a clanking noise down below, as if some person were dragging a heavy chain” thrilled as they frightened me. ‘His glance happened to rest upon a disused bell that hung in the room … It was with great astonishment and a strange, inexplicable dread, that as he looked, he saw this bell begin to swing.” ![]()
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