The Tinted Window, by ME!

I liked your story about the ghost cyclist. Effective and sad. However, despite some good writing The Tinted Window doesn't pass the MR James spook-test. The problem is the jokey and over-elaborate office frame, it is developed too much at the expense of the ghost story (it isn't exactly a ghost but a pixellated prediction.) The frame has to be as scary as the story. Think of the weird Suffolk Inn in Rats and the desolate landscape, flooded or flowering with sea lavender. I ask myself what does the tax-office frame add to the story? Could it be better set elsewhere? It's always good to embed the frightening in the realistic and mundane but the office stuff feels overlong. The humour and sexual shenanigans undercuts the terror, rather than adding to it. I can't feel fear in this workplace (perhaps if the auditors were in and the protagonist was in real fear of what he'd buried in the ledger...) MR builds up fear with his isolated bachelors as they rattle round the East Coast- they aren't able to laugh it off in company, their fear is part of their buttoned up inability to feel properly (think of the don who refuses his friend's request for the spare bed in Whistle! And I'll Come To You My Lad...) The don like lots of other single males is only able to experience terror, never love or normal human warmth. Also the set-up is too elaborate to convince me, a guy at work installing cameras around his newly acquired 19th century pile? Better a security guard watching his screens. One last thing. The really scary stories such as E F Benson's brilliant The Face work best because the character in no way deserves their fate, it is all too easy to punish a character for greed or for being a Jew as in the teeth-chattering Uncommon Prayer Book. I hope this doesn't seem negative, I love the genre and I like your writing.