War & Peace Quote by Brian Lumley

The name-drop of Harry Keogh is doing more than fan-service; it’s Lumley using his own fiction as a measuring stick for real absence. Keogh, the Necroscope, can literally converse with the dead, turning grief into dialogue and loss into information. Lumley borrows that supernatural premise not to flex imagination, but to admit a quieter hunger: the desire for a second draft of childhood, one where questions get asked before they calcify into regret.

The exclamation points matter. They’re not comic-book melodrama so much as a startled honesty, the kind you get when a writer drops the protective layer of craft and lets longing show. “God, there are an awful lot of people” starts broad, almost playful, then narrows to the real target: his father. That pivot is the subtext in miniature. We tell ourselves we’d consult history’s greats, lost friends, famous mentors. Then the truth surfaces: we mostly want the one person we never got enough time with.

The army detail is a small, devastating line of context. Twenty-two years isn’t just a job; it’s a machine that converts family life into intermittent visits, a parent into a uniform glimpsed in fragments. Lumley frames what’s missing not as affection but as apprenticeship: “things I could have learned.” It’s a writer’s phrasing, but also a son’s. The dead, in his universe, are teachers. In ours, they become questions that no longer have an address.