The Tick

by Shane Brown

Do you believe in ghosts? Have you ever wondered why it is that your work colleague has supposedly lived in three haunted houses, and yet nothing remotely supernatural has ever happened to you?

But what if they haven't actually lived in three haunted houses, but are themselves haunted? What if a ghost attaches itself to someone almost like a tick attaches itself to a dog? Once it gets its hooks into you, you don’t even know it is there to start with, and it is difficult to remove.

Have I got your attention yet?

My name is Matthew Reardon, and this is my story.

This chilling novella tells of a young man's persecution by a ghost, and is one of the darkest and most unsettling stories in Shane Brown's Ghost Stories for Christmas series so far. Read with the lights on.

139 pages, Kindle Edition

Published November 27, 2025

About the author

Shane Brown has a PhD in Film, Television and Media from the University of East Anglia in Norwich, UK, with his thesis about representations of male queerness in silent and early sound film. His book on the same subject will be published in September 2016. In 2013, Shane published his young adult novel, Breaking Point, dealing with the subject of homophobic bullying in schools. To date, it has had over 7000 Kindle downloads. A new edition was published in 2019, along with a sequel, Breaking Down. His 2016 novel, The Lookout, is an adult ghost story set on the Norfolk coast. He has also published song-by-song guides to the music of Elvis Presley and Bobby Darin.