There were the standard slumber party scary stories: the girl and her boyfriend making out in the car somewhere far from civilisation, the strange knocking and scratching on the roof, the boyfriend getting out to investigate, and the horrible finale: the screaming girl alone in the car, miles from help, watching the monster parade around with her boyfriend's head on a stick. Better than that, though, were the real scary stories. When your friends admitted that once they saw a ghost, or heard their cat miaowwing two weeks after its death, or that their strange, smelly old grandad predicted the day of his death with uncanny accuracy. God I loved that, and becoming an adult was really boring in comparison. Cheque accounts and driver's licenses and tenancy agreements - boooring.

So, for me, life is about trying to recapture that delirious thrill of the late-night ghost story told in the dark. The palpitations, the eerie sound of your friend's voice in the dark, the horrible sensation that a man in a yogi bear suit with an axe might be waiting outside. Is it any wonder I went for horror stories? The first time I picked up a Stephen King book, then put it down fully read seven hours later, I was like "o, what brave new world is this?" I read everything he wrote - except for Tommyknockers cos it was stupid. Then I discovered the women writing horror - yes, they'd all been addicted to slumber parties too, because it was all erotic and strangely thrilling - they understood that boys and scary stories go together. Anne Rice, Poppy Brite, Freda Warrington, Storm Constantine - they couldn't write the stories fast enough to keep me satisfied. I went back a generation of influence - who had they read. I got into Gothic novels something shocking. The Monk, Melmoth the Wanderer, Frankenstein. I needed more, more, MORE. There was only one solution - start writing my own. Forget about being a grown lady and cheque accounts and driver's licences and tenancy agreements. Light a few candles and make up a scary story.

Not quite that easy, but anyway that was the guiding principle.

So, slumber parties and scary stories. A few months ago, two of my friends and I got together for a scary reading night. This is the closest that grown ladies can come to slumber parties. Scary Reading Night involved the three of us sitting around at the table, by candlelight, with creepy Gothic music on, drinking red wine (one thing that the slumber parties would have been infinitely improved by) and taking turns to read scary stuff. Bits of Poe and Lovecraft. Grisly old fairy tales like the Red Shoes. Extracts from Monk Lewis and Joris Huysmans. Poems by Byron, Keats, Coleridge, Yeats, Eliot. All that was strange and beautiful. We had the best time. It could have been better I suppose if we were in our jammies in sleeping bags, but one has to make a few concessions to adulthood.

But just like the original slumber parties, the best - and scariest - stories, are the ones that are true. I love to hear true scary stories, where people very earnestly and humbly tell me that something inexplicable happened to them. I'm pretty much a non-believer surrounded by a whole bunch of other non-believers, but even amongst them there are some great little gems. My boyfriend saw an apparition in his bedroom one night while a ghostly rendition of Wagner's Flying Dutchman floated on the air. My friend Norman had to break a lease and move house because every Sunday night a nasty spirit would wake him up, hovering over his bed, and childish voices outside his window called to each other "bear, bear, don't go down there". My boyfriend's mother told me, in a delightful French accent, about Coco Bella, the strange, musty man who visited the family once a week. Coming home from boarding school one summer she saw him on the bridge and said hello, but he merely stared at her. Why not, he'd been dead for a month. And me? As a child I saw a face at the bathroom window - a strange, pointy faced man with black eyes glared at me from the other side. I screamed for my parents but when they got there he was gone. Our bathroom was on the second floor. It wasn't until years later, when I saw the pictures of aliens that abductees were drawing, that I realised why the pointy-faced man at my window had looked so strange. Everyone's got a story, and I want to hear them all. I want to make them up, too, and read them, and talk about them, and think about them. I want that slumber party feeling: gorgeous, delirious, giggly fear.

It's that childish aspect of the scary story, that identification with out-of-control hormones and a juvenile uncertainty about the inexorable laws of nature and super-nature, that have meant that the horror story has been marginalised in literary circles. Somebody once asked me when I was going to stop writing about black magic and write about real stuff, important stuff. I actually think that the occult, especially anything to do with magic, has a very close affinity with literature.

I have a fondness for old poetry, and in Edmund Spenser's 16th century epic poem "The Faerie Queene" there's this wonderful scene where a chaste young princess goes to seek the help of the magician Merlin. She finds him in his dark study, far from the eyes of the world, writing "strange characters" to make spirits do his bidding. I can't read that line without thinking of Spenser himself, probably also in a dark study far from the eyes of the world, writing words to make his characters do his bidding. It seems to me that there is little difference between the tasks of a magician and the tasks of a writer, and for me that's what makes the occult such a fascinating field to write about. While I'm writing about black magic and spell books and raising spirits, I'm reflecting on the process and power of writing itself.

Magicians, I think, have always been aware of the close relationship between magic and writing. Henry Cornelius Aggripa, the famous medieval magician, believed that the Hebrew alphabet represented the actual strucutre of the universe. To write in Hebrew letters was to rewrite the universe. The first three Sephiroth on the Cabalist Tree of Life (the holy trinity) are Kether, Chokmah, and Binah which represent thought, word, and writing. Aleister Crowley, speaking of the four symbolic tools of magic ritual likens them to the tools of the writer. He says: "The Wand is then nothing but the pen; the Cup, the Inkpot; the Dagger, the knife for sharpening the pen; and the Disk (Pentacle) is the papyrus roll itself." Thoth (in Greek, Hermes) who is the Egyptian god of magic, is also the inventer of writing. Paracelsus believed that the magician's imagination was a primary force in his practice. The word "grammar" actually traces its etymology to the Middle English word "grammarye", which also spawned the word "glamour" meaning spell-casting power, and "grimoire" meaning a book of black magic. The words have remembered through their etymology what we have forgotten - that language is always magical.

And of course it means I need no longer fear being a grammar girl rather than a glamour girl.

And how magical is a book? Think about what you see when you're reading a novel. In actuality, you are seeing black marks on a white page. I can spend a whole day with my nose in a book, but never does it feel as though I've spent the whole day running my eyes over rows and rows of anonymous letters. I see a cottage in the woods, or a family around a fireplace, or in some cases a nasty disembowelment, maybe even some really hot sex. Where do those pictures come from? It's nice to think that they're magically evoked by the incantation of writing. As far as I'm concerned it's totally in the realm of the supernatural. How can a writer not believe in magic?

Okay, it's magical but is it scary? Well, yes sometimes it is. The legend goes that the lyrics to "Stairway to Heaven" were channelled by Robert Plant in a fit of automatic writing. Whether or not heavy doses of hash and Tolkien were part of the deal, I don't know. But most writers will recognise a feeling of automatic writing when they're working. We all say it. It's like the character pulled up a chair and talked to me. I wrote for hours and didn't even realise time was passing. It's like the ideas were coming from beyond me and the words appeared fully formed on my fingertips. For me, at least, I have trouble taking credit for my writing because it does seem to come from somewhere other than inside my head.

So, what if. What if the ideas are actually coming from somewhere outside me? What if I am channelling the stories of spirits - spirits who have crossed over, spirits from other dimensions, spirits that were never even born and can only experience life through the medium of a receptive writer's imagination. I didn't choose to be a writer, stories and characters have always chosen me. I've been taking a few months off writing to finish my honours thesis, but the characters for my new book are obsessing me. I even dream about them. Perhaps writing is a kind of spiritual possession. Cool, huh?

Anyway, it's surely some kind of magical transformation that has taken me from telling scary stories to friends at slumber parties to telling them to strangers internationally. As far as I can remember I didn't make a pact with the devil to do it, but who knows what really happens when a group of teenage girls get out a ouija board? Thanks a lot and I'll see you all in hell.

(© Kim Wilkins 1998)