From My Reading Chair…
‘No Such Thing’ was almost a little too true for my liking…
When I first stumbled across this story, No Such Thing was out of print. Future editions were uncertain. Second-hand copies had begun floating around the internet wearing price tags usually reserved for minor antiques and cursed jewellery. Not even exaggerating: I saw one copy listed for 500 quid!
So I acquired a pre-loved ex-library copy. Obviously. A former library book finding an afterlife on my shelves? Be still my bibliographic heart!
Then, when I FINALLY received it, I opened it and discovered what a beauty it truly is!
The cover is quintessential Flying Eye: bold, illustrative and immediately intriguing, but Bailey’s domestic world is unmistakably her own. The off-white paper is beautiful: warm rather than stark, allowing Ella Bailey’s neon pinks, blues and greens to crackle across it like trick-or-treat sweets scattered over a mid-century carpet.
Crisp linework, flattened shapes and print-like colour give the pages a delicious whiff of mid-century design and 1960s kitsch without turning the house into a museum piece.
It feels lived in. Which matters because this haunting is rooted in ordinary domesticity.
Georgia does not believe in ghosts. Every suspicious event receives a perfectly rational explanation: the cobwebs, the missing clothes, the smashed vase. She moves through the rooms solving each mystery while the ghosty residents continue their spectral shenanigans just beyond her peripheral certainty.
The joke belongs to the gap between what Georgia believes and what the page allows us to see. On a first read, the story invites us to follow her investigation. On every visit afterward, we become shameless little ghost busters.
The hidden ghosts transform rereading into an exercise in almost CSI-level evidence gathering. We scan corners, shelves and doorways, noticing how long they have been present and how confidently Georgia has interpreted a second narrative unfolding around her.
I adore the hand-drawn posters and scribbles because they make the home feel inhabited by a real child rather than arranged around a generic protagonist. These tiny marks establish Georgia’s presence and make the ghosts’ secret occupation of the same rooms feel even more whimsically intimate.
At last, the final page gathers the little spectres into a Halloween party. BOO-utiful! All those little disturbances, and now look at them making merry!
No Such Thing is one of my favourite haunted-house books precisely because the house is not remote, ruined or theatrically gothic. It is an everyday home full of paper, clothes, drawings, accidents and competing explanations.
The supernatural has not arrived from some other gloriously gothic residence or portal of the unknown. It lives beside us, in our everyday lives.
You simply have to know where to look.
Creep on Reading, Pumpkins!