“The Old Horror Writer” was an anxiety story. I publish frequently, but you cannot say that I’m bestriding the literary world like a colossus. From time to time, I have dark thoughts about whether I’m wasting my effort, or where I’ll end up on the day the words stop coming. So I set up a character who was very specifically a version of myself and filled his tale with my bleakest musings about this endeavor that’s consumed my life, and its relevancy to the fate of this beleaguered planet.

The most obvious inspiration for the story, of course, is The Boy Who Came Back From Heaven, which is a nonfiction account by Kevin Malarkey and his son Alex (that’s really their last names . . . you can’t make this stuff up) where they claim that Alex saw Heaven while he was a in a coma. The boy later recanted, saying his dad had planted the whole story in his mind, and it was a huge mess, but for a while it was quite a cultural phenomenon. There was even a major studio picture, starring Greg Kinnear.

I went to an exhibition at our National Museum that exhibited artifacts from Australia’s bushrangers. In the middle of the room stood a large, solid wooden door, soft with age, riddled with bullet holes. One of Ben Hall’s gang had been shot and killed in front of this door. The bullet holes were distinctive, and I thought I saw bloodstains, and the image was so powerful I almost imagined his ghost, up against the door. I thought about other doors, and what happens behind them

There was genuinely a wonderful, evocative scent that haunted me in my teens. I’ve no idea if it was a perfume I smelt once on a passing stranger or something I conjured from my own imagination, but I could evoke it at will, and once I had, it would tantalize me for days. I really did travel into Moorgate on the train every day with my friends for school, and I was once taken to an air show by my Aunty Anne (who fed me far too many boiled eggs). I’ve known for years that there was a story somewhere to be built around this “ghost” scent.