The Lamp in the Window by Tom Mead A Victorian Ghost Story

A crime writer’s discipline turned on the classic winter ghost story, and it works.

The Lamp in the Window | Tom Mead | Absinthe Books (PS Publishing) | June 2026 |

A click, then a slap. That is the sound Tom Mead leaves ringing in your ears in The Lamp in the Window, his first full step into the Victorian ghost story. Every Christmas Eve, an old don named Roland Spence lights a lamp on his sill and tells his students a tale by the fire. Years later, one of them must reckon with what those stories were hiding. This Christmas ghost story novella from Absinthe Books trades gore for slow, patient dread, and pairs the eerie winter chill of M.R. James with the tight plotting of a Golden Age mystery.

The Lamp in the Window by Tom Mead: Victorian Ghost Story

A click, then a slap. That is the noise Tom Mead planted in my head somewhere around the fourth page, the sound a wet thing makes as it pads along a towpath behind you, and I have not been able to shake it since.

Here is the shape of it. Every Christmas Eve, an old Victorian don named Roland Spence lights an oil lamp on his windowsill. Across the dark college grounds, along the frozen path beside the water, his students see the glow and know what it means. Port. Mince pies. A fire built high. And once the clock strikes eleven, a ghost story told by Spence himself, who is very, very good at it.

Kershaw is one of those students. We meet him twice. First as a jittery nineteen-year-old in 1867, desperate to be liked by the right people. Then again in 1899, grown, married, two children underfoot, a comfortable study of his own. Something happened in those college years. Something he has spent three decades trying not to think about. The lamp in the window is about to make him think about it.

What kind of horror is this? The old, patient, well-mannered kind. There is no gore thrown at you, no jump scare on every page, no monster stomping through the plot. Mead works by cold and by accumulation. He lets you sit in Spence’s warm rooms with a glass in your hand, and then he opens a small window somewhere and lets the draught in. You feel it before you can name it. By the time you understand what the chill is, it is already at your collar.

The structure is a set of boxes inside boxes. A story about a man remembering the stories he was told. Inside those told stories sit smaller ones again. It could have been a mess. It is the opposite. Mead keeps the joins clean and the frame always in view, so you never lose your footing even as the floor keeps dropping away beneath you. Each interior tale reads like a genuine period piece, the sort of thing you might find in a foxed old anthology, and yet none of them is filler. Every one drops a small object into the frame that you will pick up again later, heavier than before.

Take the tale he calls “Old Spindlejack.” A historian travels to a tiny Hampshire church to study nine stained-glass windows by a long-dead master glazier. Eight of them are dull. The ninth shows a figure standing apart from the crowd, and the longer you look at that figure the more wrong he becomes. A kink in the neck. A limb turned the wrong way. It is a beautifully controlled piece of unease, and it works the way the best of this genre works, by making you complicit in the looking.

Or “Ashes,” where a mean old London landlord finds a child’s shoe in his grate and decides, with terrible calm, to buy a screen so he never has to see what the fire brings him next. That image has not left me. A man who purchases a pretty screen to avoid looking at his own guilt. You could hang a whole century of English comfort on that single hook.

Mead’s prose is precise and quietly funny and never shows off. He writes like a man laying a table for a dinner he already knows will end badly, every fork placed just so, every candle lit, the whole arrangement designed so the eventual smash lands harder. His period voice is faultless. The Latin busts on the mantel, the reupholstered leather, the port and the pittering drips, all of it sits right without ever tipping into costume drama. And he trusts silence. He knows the scariest thing on a page is often the thing he chooses not to describe.

The point of view deserves a mention too. We ride close behind Kershaw, close enough to feel his snobbery and his cowardice, and Mead does not soften either. Kershaw is not a good man. He is a frightened one, which is worse and more interesting. The real pleasure here is watching a smug Victorian gentleman work out that the past has a long arm. It has a longer memory too. That is the heart of the thing, quite apart from the ghost.

So what is the book actually about, underneath the cold and the candlelight?

Guilt. The kind you bury young and hope will stay buried. The kind that waits. Mead is interested in the stories we tell to keep the truth at a safe distance, and in how those stories have a habit of turning on us. Spence’s Christmas tales are a warning dressed as an amusement. The whole book asks a hard question. What do you owe the thing you looked away from?

There is a class conscience running through it as well, and I liked that a great deal. The miser and the child’s shoe. The comfortable men in warm rooms and the cold things their comfort rests upon. Victorian England loved a ghost story at Christmas precisely because it let respectable people feel a shiver of the guilt they spent the rest of the year ignoring. Mead knows this, and he turns the tradition back on itself. His ghosts are not random. They are owed.

That is what lifts this above pastiche. Plenty of writers can do the M.R. James furniture. Fewer understand why James mattered. His tales were always about knowledge you should not have gone looking for, and a bill that comes due. Mead understands it in his bones.

Which brings me to where he has come from. This is a real turn for him.

Tom Mead made his name with the Joseph Spector books, locked-room mysteries in the Golden Age tradition. Death and the Conjuror, The Murder Wheel, Cabaret Macabre, The House at Devil’s Neck. Puzzles, all of them, built to be solved. In those books the impossible always has a mundane answer waiting behind the curtain. The magician shows you the trick, then shows you how it was done.

The House at Devil’s Neck flirted with the supernatural, a seance, a phantom soldier, a storm-locked house, before pulling the rational rug out from under it in classic fashion. The Lamp in the Window is the moment Mead stops pulling the rug. Here the ghost is real. Here the trick has no wires. And the fascinating thing is how much his mystery training pays off in this new mode. A crime writer’s discipline runs all through this book.

The planting, the echoes, the sense that every detail has been placed on purpose and will be answered. He builds a ghost story with the rigour of a locked room, so the supernatural never feels arbitrary. It feels earned. It feels, God help us, fair.

Where does it sit in the wider field? Squarely in the revival of the classic winter ghost story, the quiet British strain that never really died. It arrives from Absinthe Books, the novella imprint of PS Publishing, which has spent years putting out exactly this sort of quiet, small-batch dark fiction.

The nearest living cousin I can point to is Reggie Oliver, who works the same book-lined, art-and-relic seam with the same easy grace. Readers who loved Susan Hill’s The Woman in Black for its restraint, or Michelle Paver’s Dark Matter for its slow, cold patience, will feel instantly at home here. What sets Mead apart is the moral weight under the frame. His nested tales are not decoration. They are evidence.

And it says something about where horror is drifting, back towards restraint, towards the slow burn, towards the idea that the most frightening story is a true one you have been avoiding. In an age of louder and louder scares, Mead turns the volume down and somehow makes it worse. That takes nerve.

I have read a lot of ghost stories. This is one of the good ones, the sort that makes you check the room is empty before you switch off the lamp.

Light the fire, pour the sherry, and open it on the coldest night you can find. Just remember that Roland Spence never told a story without a reason, and neither has Tom Mead. Two hundred copies of this thing exist in the world, and I would not sit on my hands waiting for a reprint.

The Lamp in the Window by Tom Mead

A NOVELLA by Tom Mead
CATEGORY  Supernatural / Ghost story
PUBLICATION DATE  June 2026
COVER ART  Yorgos Cotronis
PAGES  101

EDITION
Signed Hardcover, limited to 200 numbered copies signed by the author — ISBN 978-1-80394-571-2  [£20]

ABOUT THE BOOK

“The Lamp in the Window is a wonderful take on the classic ghost story, featuring tales within tales, unexpected twists, and gruesome turns that would make Dickens and James proud. Beautifully written and gorgeously realised, it’s a total delight.”

—Tim Lebbon, New York Times bestselling author

“There’s a long tradition of telling ghost stories on Christmas Eve, and Tom Mead’s novella conjures every bit of the atmosphere, suspense and enjoyment those words suggest. The Lamp in the Window is a delight to read and instantly one of my favourites of the genre.”

—Alison Littlewood, Shirley Jackson Award-winning author of A Cold Season and The Cottingley Cuckoo

Are you sitting comfortably? Then I’ll begin…
Each Christmas Eve, academic and antiquarian Roland Spence invites a select group of students to his quarters to indulge in a glass or two of port, and to listen to a ghostly tale by the fireside. It seems like an innocent enough tradition—after all, who doesn’t enjoy a wintry chill at Christmastime? Decades later, one of Spence’s students must revisit those half-remembered stories as a long-buried secret threatens to resurface…
Inspired by M.R. James, E.F. Benson, Algernon Blackwood et al, The Lamp in the Window is an eerie winter ghost story in the classic Victorian tradition.  

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