Books To Read in the Dark
An October meditation on the roots of scary stories & book recommendations
It’s that time of year again—in the northern hemisphere, at least—when a chill descends and the leaves wither and fall from the trees. We’ve been lucky to escape major damage from the recent hurricanes—I hope all of you are safe and well too—and I’m thankful for the cooling weather.
This season is a period of reflection for me because of how many family members I lost early in life. I always look forward to the harvest celebration of my Celtic ancestors, Samhain; the darkening of days; the time when everyone else starts thinking about spirits and ghosts as much as I do.
An author friend recently asked me an intriguing question about whether I thought fairy tales were a precursor to Gothic novels and horror fiction, and I got to thinking about how far back scary stories go. There’s classic gothic fiction, fairy tales, and folktales and legends before them; scary stories have been told around campfires around the globe. There are terrifying Native American legends, monsters in Greek mythology, the frightening daoine sith of Scotland and Ireland, the ghosts of Chinese folklore, and more.
It seems the tendency to take pleasure in scary stories goes back to the beginning of storytelling itself. What is more entertaining—more distracting—from the difficulties in your own life than a story about something unthinkable and terrifying happening to someone else? During some of the most stressful periods of my life, I’ve read horror fiction and binged The Walking Dead.
It’s really difficult to think about your own problems when you’re watching somebody face zombies.
This October, I thought I’d put together a list of four books to read in the dark—to distract you from stressful times, to get you thinking about your ancestral and personal ghosts.
River Woman, River Demon
“Light and shadow are not binaries nor poles but sourced from the same spring of energy.”
—Jennifer Givhan, River Woman, River Demon
Jennifer Givhan’s 2022 gothic mystery novel, River Woman, River Demon, contains rich insights into the folk magick that fills its pages. This book is a gorgeous, shadowy thing. The novel follows Eva Santos Moon, a burgeoning artist whose husband is accused of murder, who must confront her past and embrace her magick to find out what really happened. It’s a tense and suspenseful book, a kaleidoscopic thriller that explores the way trauma can fragment memory. But it’s also a hopeful book, the story of a woman confronting her demons, a woman coming into her own power and learning to love—and forgive—herself.
I devoured it in forty-eight hours, and it only took me that long because I was caring for a five-month-old infant! I still vividly remember the afternoon I was reading the climax, when every single noise in my house made me jump—in the middle of the day, mind you. Jenn is a gifted poet, and each sentence she writes is like an incantation. If you love lyrical, sharp prose, or if you’re interested in brujería, I highly recommend reading this novel this month.
The Haunting of Hill House
“Whatever walked there, walked alone.”
—Shirley Jackson, The Haunting of Hill House
As a diehard Shirley Jackson fan, I firmly believe that no October reading list would be complete without the haunted house novel that literally inspired a genre. This is a story about personal ghosts and trauma, a story about the conditions that might lead us to lose touch with reality. If you haven’t read it, Hill House is a novel about a young woman with a history of non-ordinary experiences, Eleanor Vance, who has been existentially lonely for a very long time while taking care of her ailing mother. When parapsychologist Dr. John Montague hears of a house that’s supposed to be haunted, he invites Eleanor and a few other supernaturally gifted people to stay there for a weekend, so he can study them.
I was introduced to parapsychology by my beloved uncle who wrote his master’s thesis on out-of-body experiences in the 1970s and was later diagnosed with schizophrenia. He lived with us while he was recovering from psychotic symptoms when I was a child, and I read his thesis as a teenager. His experiences, as well as my own tendency to experience reality a bit differently than others—I have bipolar disorder—make the themes of this book fascinating to me. Like River Woman, I read Hill House in a two-day period during which I did not want to do anything other than read. If you haven’t read it, please visit your local independent bookstore and procure it promptly.
The Devil and Mrs. Davenport
“She’d do her best to stay quiet and small. The way he liked her.”
—Paulette Kennedy, The Devil and Mrs. Davenport
Speaking of parapsychology, author Paulette Kennedy’s latest novel, The Devil and Mrs Davenport, follows a 1950s suburban housewife named Loretta Davenport whose life changes utterly after a local girl is murdered and she suffers a series of strange fevers. She begins seeing ghosts—spiritual shadows of the past—who whisper secrets. Loretta is married to an ambitious assistant professor at a local evangelical college, and she has tried very hard all her married life to please her husband. But Pete dismisses her visions as products of her fevered imagination, at first, and later condemns them as demonic. I am sure everyone on this newsletter list will be as pleased as I was when Loretta started to defy him, opening herself to her visions in the hopes that she can solve the murder.
Yes, that’s right—a parapsychologist, a supernaturally gifted woman, and a murder mystery set in the 1950s—if you love Shirley Jackson as much as I do, you will no doubt devour this one as quickly as I did. It’s not only a gripping portrait of stifling mid-century society, but a story of a woman coming into her power.
The ending, by the way, is deeply satisfying.
Her Body and Other Parties
“The mask slipped over me and I was on the moon.”
—Carmen Maria Machado, “Eight Bites”
Her Body and Other Parties is a famously subversive, realistic, and creepy short story collection. I highly recommend it if you haven’t read it yet! One of the short stories, “Eight Bites,” is among my top three short stories ever; it’s a story about a woman who has bariatric surgery and is haunted by her former self. There’s also “The Resident,” a story about a writer who goes on a haunted writing residency, and “The Husband Stitch,” a play on the urban legend retold by Alan Schwartz, which is probably responsible for traumatizing an entire generation of Gen X readers, “The Girl with the Green Ribbon.”
Carmen Maria Machado is a master of lyrical prose, nuanced characterization, suspense, and building realistic worlds that seem like ours—until, slowly, you realize with a creeping sense of dread, they are something else altogether. If you haven’t read this book, treat yourself.
That’s all for now, though of course I would be remiss if I didn’t mention The Book of Gothel and A Rose by any Other Name, also great reads for October, if you haven’t read them yet! Both are stories about brave women and witches who confront the shadows inside them and come out stronger.
Let me know what scary books you’d recommend this October—the sort of thing that will keep me up at night!
Mary