“The uncanny is that class of the frightening which leads back to what is known of old and long familiar.’
There are books that walk up to you politely, clear their throat, and begin to speak. And then there are books that arrive like a temperature drop, quiet, invisible, startling only when you realise the air has changed. Sanjoy K Roy’s debut, There’s a Ghost in My Room: Living with the Supernatural, belongs to the latter. It unsettles gently, intimately, not through theatrics but through the slow revelation that the world is less solid, less sealed, than we assume.
Most ghost stories operate like fireworks: bright, quick, eager to shock. Roy’s book, however, behaves more like a lantern carried through an old house. It shows corners, glimmers on forgotten staircases, catches the shape of something moving just beyond your field of vision. It is a memoir built not on fear, but on familiarity, with presences that appear, disappear, and often linger in the mind long after they’ve left the room.
The haunted house as homeland
Roy’s journey into the supernatural begins early, in his ancestral home in then-Calcutta. As a child, he lives not in fear, but in an odd companionship with the unseen. Spirits do not seem to be…
Source: ‘There’s a Ghost in My Room’: Sanjoy K Roy writes about hauntings with humour, curiosity, lightness
