Author Guest Post: M.F.Jones

Hauntings

By M. F. Jones

I have always loved stories about characters who are haunted – whether by actual paranormal entities, like the count in Dracula or the demon in The Exorcist; or by their own inner psychological states, like traumatic memories or lifelong feelings of being unlovable or inadequate. Eleanor in Shirley Jackson’s classic The Haunting of Hill House is an example of a woman desperately needing to belong to someone or something, a need that is fulfilled when the force possessing the house kills her and unites her spirit with its own for eternity.

In my book, Soldier’s Joy, the hero, Avery Gowan, an Army sergeant newly returned from the Iraq war, is haunted by memories of the mission he led that killed three of his friends and maimed another. Then the haunting takes another form when a ghost appears to him one night. The apparition looks uncannily like him, and knows his name and the names of his family members. The spectral visitor insists that he only wants to help Avery; that in life he was himself a soldier and understands the damage war can do. Avery, afraid he’s losing his mind, banishes the ghost, who in departing tells Avery that a woman he has just met, Jessie Gibbs, can help him heal.

Avery and Jessie begin a rocky romance. In her own way, Jessie is haunted, too, by the loss of a love affair that ended just before she met Avery. She knows she must tell Avery about it. But she fears it will cost her his love, and, even worse, shatter the fragile peace he has begun to achieve through their relationship.

In stories of external hauntings, freedom can only be achieved when the demon or evil force is confronted and vanquished. In psychological hauntings like Avery’s and Jessie’s, hard truths, however disturbing, must be shared and dealt with together if the couple are to achieve both individual wholeness and the happy union they long for. It helps to have the assistance of a well-intentioned supernatural matchmaker!