Lucknow, After the Lamps Go Out: Tales of Ghosts and Jinns
After dark falls over Lucknow, the city transforms. Parveen Talha's collection pulls you through crumbling neighbourhoods, abandoned estates and forgotten burial grounds where the boundary between living memory and spectral presence blurs entirely. These aren't jump-scares dressed as literature. Instead, they're narratives woven from the city's own fabric—tales saturated in loss, cultural richness and the weight of centuries. The book traces how 1857's violence continues to reverberate through Lucknow's streets and buildings. Spirits linger in courtyards. Jinns surface in human affairs. Legends attach themselves to the Residency, La Martinière, and other landmarks that carry their own troubled stories. What emerges is less conventional horror and more a sustained, unsettling meditation on how places remember what their inhabitants wish to forget. Talha draws equally from folklore, Islamic tradition and lived testimony, crafting something genuinely distinctive. Her prose maintains an eerie restraint—melancholic rather than sensational, quietly unnerving rather than bombastic. Readers seeking atmospheric, place-rooted storytelling will find themselves captivated by a writer who understands Lucknow's soul, its architecture, its grief. This isn't just another ghost story collection. It's a literary portrait of a city where the past refuses to stay buried, and where the dead continue their quiet, haunting presence long after the lamps extinguish.
- Author: Parveen Talha
- Publisher: Rupa Publications India
- Genre: Horror
- ISBN: 978-9376463787
- Pages: 168 pages