:-o A Spooky Reading List
Friend of WORD and festival trustee Dr Erin Harrington has shared with us this neat listicle of haunted, spooky books in time for Halloween. Read on, boils and ghouls!
Shirtley Jackson
Shirley Jackson’s gothic horror novel is perhaps the benchmark for haunted house stories. It’s a taut, unsettling story in which a group of paranormal investigators attempt to spend some time in Hill House, an isolated mansion that is fundamentally wrong. It feels imbued with sickness. Its architecture is impossible. Horrendous things happen in the night. Previous guests have been scarred for life – or worse. Is it that the house is haunted, or are the supernatural phenomena this particular group is experiencing some kind of projection coming from Eleanor Vance, an emotionally fragile young woman who the house seems to target? A tour de force of paranoid storytelling.
The Shining
Stephen King
A classic of the golden age of horror publishing, and the book that helped cement Stephen King as a best-selling horror legend. Jack Torrance, a struggling writer and recovering alcoholic, moves into the alpine Overlook Hotel with his wife Wendy and kid Danny to work as the winter caretaker. Things do not go well. Like The Haunting of Hill House, the sprawling Overlook is a malevolent force that seeks to possess and consume its inhabitants, and it’s particularly interested in Danny’s secret psychic abilities. The chief fear in any haunted house story is that the place you’re meant to be safest in is both a threat and antagonist. Now add malevolent ghosts, a winter storm, and a descent into insanity and you have a really good time (just not for the Torrances).
Seven Empty Houses
Samanta Schweblin
Argentine author and three-time International Booker finalist Samanta Schweblin is a master of the short fiction form, as anyone who read her disturbing novella Fever Dream will tell you. Her collection Seven Empty Houses offers seven uncanny stories set in or near different domestic environments. Some are about literal hauntings, others delve into strange behaviours, and all look askance at repressed horrors that can’t help but creep back in. Argentina’s traumatic recent history sits uneasily beneath many of the stories, lending the stories’ interest in class, power, family, absence and memory a particular weight.
In the Dream House
Carmen Maria Machado (2019)
Her Body and Other Parties author Carmen Maria Machado uses the figure of the unsettled home as ‘bad place’ skilfully in her ambitious, experimental memoir. It’s a compelling and affecting account of domestic violence in queer relationships, in which Machado explores how her relationship with the charismatic, unnamed “woman in the dream house” went from exciting to volatile to abusive. Each brief chapter is told in a different genre, or through the lens of a different trope. The fragmented structure expresses the sense of trying to understand something incomprehensible. Dark, but also witty, playful and compassionate.
There’s A Ghost In This House
Oliver Jeffers
We’re going on a ghost hunt! In this lovely picture book, a young girl has never seen the ghosts that live in her rambling haunted house – but we can. The book has semi-opaque pages that, when laid over the illustrations, reveal a lot of spooky antics. The friendly ghosts – floating sheets with holes for eyes – play hide and seek, swing from the chandeliers and peer out windows, all while the girl gives us a tour of the rambling house. The mixed media illustrations combine drawing and painting with moody photographs.
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