Pale Winter Light

by Jeremy Page

293 pages, Paperback

Published October 22, 2025

Reviews

[James Kinsley]

Magnificent collection of genuinely creepy, unsettling tales. Page has found a way of inserting old-school ghostly terrors into very modern stories, and it's wonderful.

[Jennifer]

Ghost stories have never had any appeal for me so I was very much reliant on Jeremy Page's writing to carry me through. He describes these as strange stories and that's more accurate... enough is left open to remain accessible to the likes of me, I am happy to be unnerved. I paced myself, taking my time, interspersing my reading with other, very different, books, and that was important.

These are modern stories: a Great Yarmouth hen party, caravans lived in by hospitality workers, a tenant farmer moving into a bungalow.

The title goes beautifully with both words and images and the writing delicately, probably implicitly, certainly never overdone, conveys visceral experiences: when I think of these stories I think of smells and the feel on the skin and the air breathed in.

[Rose Paris]

Wonderful book of weird stories. The blurb compares to the East Anglian classic ghost stories of M.R James, this has a very modern twist but certainly evokes his eeryness. I also detect influences from the more contempororary author John Gordon, particularly in 'Ice'. Standout stories for me were : The Murder of Crows, exploring a pregnant woman's isolation, A Marl Pit, reminiscent of James's 'The Mezzotint, Hen, a cautionary tale with an unexpected ending, and Room 13, a satisfying classic ghost story.