The modern ghost story has been diluted into décor. A bit of mist, a bit of folklore, a “creepy cottage” on a cover, and the reader gets to feel pleasantly spooked without being touched. C.J. Cooke came along and dragged it back to what it’s meant to do: unsettle the living, expose the rot, and make the past refuse to stay past. She doesn’t write hauntings as entertainment. She writes them as pressure—psychological, social, institutional—until the supernatural starts to feel less like a trick and more like the only honest language left.
Cooke’s genius is that she starts where the old ghost story started: in the home. Not the cosy home the market sells, but the home as trap, as stage, as surveillance system. In The Nesting, she takes the domestic and turns it feral—new motherhood, isolation, a house that doesn’t feel safe, a mind being slowly pushed into a corner. The fear isn’t “boo, a ghost.” It’s: how easily can a woman be made to doubt herself when she’s exhausted, alone, and expected to smile through it? That’s psychological suspense with teeth, and it’s the spine of everything she does.
Then she goes bigger without going softer. The Lighthouse Witches takes a remote Scottish island and a lighthouse—two things the tourist imagination can’t stop fetishising—and turns them into an argument about generational harm. Witches, missing girls, time refusing to behave: it’s not folklore wallpaper. It’s the story of how communities police women, how belief becomes justification, and how “family” can be a curse that keeps collecting interest. The lighthouse isn’t a quaint landmark. It’s a warning tower: look what gets hidden when places are allowed to mythologise themselves.
Cooke’s hauntings don’t whisper “spooky.” They scream “pattern”—the same harms repeating until somebody finally stops calling it fate.
She keeps returning to Scotland because Scotland is perfect for the kind of ghost story she writes: a country thick with layered histories, religious control, institutional silence, and a cultural habit of dressing brutality up as tradition. The Ghost Woods drops you into a house in the woods used to contain young pregnant women, and the horror isn’t just spectral. It’s structural. The building becomes a holding pen for shame, and the woods don’t romanticise it—they close in. Cooke understands that you don’t need to invent evil; you just need to show what happens when society decides certain bodies are problems to be managed.
And when she takes the ghost story out of the house, she doesn’t turn it into spectacle. A Haunting in the Arctic is cold and claustrophobic, built around a whaling voyage and a stranded, haunted wreck. It’s still the same engine: two timelines, a woman trapped inside other people’s decisions, the past crawling into the present with a wet, unignorable hand. She uses the Arctic the way she uses a Scottish island: not as atmosphere, but as isolation weaponised. When escape is physically impossible, every lie becomes louder. Every fear becomes doctrine.
What makes this a “modern tradition” rather than a run of gothic thrillers is that Cooke keeps marrying the supernatural to the psychological and the political without letting any of them cancel the others out. The ghost is never just a ghost; it’s an accusation. The dread is never just mood; it’s the sensation of being boxed in by forces you’re told not to name. That’s why her books move like suspense: you’re not waiting for a jump-scare, you’re watching a trap tighten.
Her more recent work pushes the pattern into explicit historical violence. The Book of Witching yokes contemporary Glasgow to Orkney’s witch-burning past, refusing the cute “witchy” aesthetic that’s become a lifestyle product. Cooke doesn’t write witches to sell empowerment. She writes them to show what happens when punishment is dressed up as righteousness and the crowd calls it order. The point isn’t that we’ve changed. The point is the story we tell ourselves so we don’t have to admit how easily we’d do it again, in cleaner language.
The market wants witchcraft as a vibe; Cooke writes it as evidence—names, bodies, fires, and the polite machinery that always pretends it’s for the public good.
This is also why she’s divisive in the way the best popular fiction often is. Some readers want their ghost stories safely irrational—creepy fun, nothing more. Cooke keeps dragging the fear back to real life: motherhood that isn’t sanctified, communities that aren’t wholesome, institutions that don’t protect, history that doesn’t stay in the museum. If you came for comfort, she denies you the exit. If you came for a tidy “it was all in her head,” she refuses that cop-out too. The head is part of it. The world is part of it. The haunting is the seam where they meet.
Cooke didn’t revive the ghost story by polishing it. She revived it by making it useful again—making it bite, making it expose, making it impossible to treat women’s fear as overreaction or entertainment. Read her like the tradition deserves: not as a spooky holiday, but as a reckoning you don’t get to mute.
