This Week in Fiction: John Lanchester on Ghost Stories
Your story in this week’s issue, “Signal,” is set at an English country-house party over New Year’s Eve. It’s a very twenty-first-century country-house party—the host, an old college friend of the narrator’s, is some kind of finance gazillionaire (“the kind of rich that even other people who were rich considered rich”), rather than an earl. When did you first think about using this kind of gathering as the setting for a story, and how interested were you in its contemporary trappings?