Having recently spent time in various retail outlets, I’m reliably informed we’re starting to get in the Halloween spirit. As it happens, I’ve read some great ghost stories, creepy tales, and otherwise spooky stuff this year, so I thought I’d do my part by writing up a little rec list. Many of these are not exactly obscure—Machado is a darling of queer readerly circles, and the Ward won the 2017 National Book Award—but I’m sharing the wealth in case they’re new to you!
Her Body and Other Parties by Carmen Maria Machado: Queer short stories with an excellent ear for both pop culture (several of these stories are laugh-out-loud funny, in addition to shivering one’s spine) and a sort of X-Files-esque aesthetic of the eerie and the fantastic. Many of these stories have a vibe of dark fairy-tales reworked through queer and feminist lenses (“The Husband Stitch,” “Mothers”). Others play with format in really delightful and effective ways: “Inventory,” for example, takes the form of a list of all the people with whom the author has had sex, and only as the story progresses does a larger, darker narrative begin to peek in at the edges. Likewise, “Especially Heinous” presents us with 272 episode summaries from Law & Order: SVU, which gradually diverge (I ASSUME) from the actual episodes as the story goes along. This is one of the less scary volumes on this list, but it’s still spooky enough to be satisfyingly Halloween-appropriate.
Sing, Unburied, Sing by Jesmyn Ward: The ghosts in Ward’s novel are literal—the characters have an everyday, working relationship with the supernatural, including the presences of people who have died—but they’re also figurative. Sing, Unburied, Sing is deeply engaged with the lasting legacy of the US prison system and its various ghosts: the ghosts of the slave plantation that live on in the forced prison labor required disproportionately of Black men; the ghosts of their own past traumas that haunt the formerly-incarcerated; the ghosts of their absent fathers that haunt the children even of still-living prisoners; and the legacy of poverty that this system passes on from one generation to the next. I am probably about the 69238th person to compare this novel to Toni Morrison’s Beloved, but the ghosts do work similarly here: they’re both a fact of life for these characters, part of the ingrained fabric of the natural world; and also a way of talking about horrific systemic oppression; and both levels work extremely well. I also appreciated Ward’s ability to maintain empathy for all her point-of-view characters, even when they are making heartbreaking and destructive decisions. The meth-addicted and un-maternal mother Leonie would have been particularly easy to demonize, but Ward resists the temptation, something I very much respect.
Fever Dream by Samantha Schweblin: This short novel is EXTREMELY CREEPY. Y’all. It creeped me the fuck out. Honestly I don’t even want to say much about it beforehand, since part of the effect depends on immersing yourself in the (literally) fevered, stream-of-consciousness(ish) narration for long enough to figure out what’s happening. I read it all in one sitting of about three hours, and I thought it was incredibly effective: claustrophobic, disorienting, and reminiscent of the feeling of being trapped in a nightmare, in a way that the reader can’t help but share. I especially liked way Schweblin leaves the story very open to several extremely different interpretations of what’s going on—all of which are scary, just in different ways. A seriously well-written and freaky little book.
Things to Do When You’re Goth in the Country by Chavisa Woods: Those who liked the Machado collection will probably like this one, too. It has a similarly assertive level of queerness (maybe even more so), a similar sort of dry, situational humor, and a similar feel for the eerie and the grotesque—though the fantastical in Woods’s fiction tends less fairy-tale, more Weird Science. Woods’s collection focuses particularly on the experience of growing up extremely poor in extremely rural American towns—her narrator-protagonists are generally adults either returning to, looking back on, or otherwise trying to engage with, the small towns of their childhoods. For my money, the three strongest stories are “How to Stop Smoking in Nineteen Thousand Two Hundred and Eighty-Seven Seconds, Usama” (in which the queer, big-city sister returns to the town of her origin and has a weird, and then weirder, and then TRULY weird night), “Zombie” (in which two pre-adolescent girls befriend the inhabitant of their local graveyard), and “What’s Happening on the News?” (which deals, in multiple ways, with the inculcation of value systems in children—in particular, evangelical Christianity and US military recruitment).
Things We Lost in the Fire by Mariana Enriquez: This collection is the second on this list from Argentina (the first being the Schweblin), so apparently there’s a lot of great literary horror coming out of Buenos Aires right now. Enriquez’s work is more standard scary-story fare than the Schweblin, but these stories are notable for their extremely well-evoked sense of place. One memorable and cheer-worthy story, “Spiderweb,” takes place in the rural north, during a vacation shared by a woman and the unpleasant man she impetuously married, but for most of these stories, “place” means the poorer neighborhoods of Buenos Aires. In a story like “The Dirty Kid,” for example, the rampant poverty becomes a kind of supernatural spectre in its own right, or at least makes it difficult for the narrator to distinguish between everyday cruelty and supernatural darkness. Other stories use Buenos Aires as a covertly post-apocalyptic setting, or past political turmoil as an ominous backdrop for a coming-of-age tale. Overall a very satisfying & well-executed scary-story collection.
The Third Hotel by Laura van den Berg: When I finished this novel I told @greywash that “The film adaptation should be directed by David Lynch… except it’s also outspokenly feminist, so actually, maybe not.” Van den Berg does have a great sense for the kinds of details that make Lynch films enjoyable, though, and The Third Hotel—in which the recently-widowed elevator saleswoman Clare goes to Havana on a film-festival trip originally planned out with her late husband Richard (a film studies professor specializing in horror) only to repeatedly glimpse the supposedly-dead Richard in various places throughout the city—hits most of them: doppelgangers, pseudo-resurrection, people putting on different personae for reasons they themselves don’t entirely understand, travel that gets surreally out of control, nightmarish parties, unexplained interpersonal quirks, the breakdown of domestic life, the spooky underbelly of everyday Americana, and so on. At the same time, van den Berg offers some sharp commentary on the kinds of social burdens and expectations that are placed on women, and how women’s weirdnesses are processed differently to those of men. A highly recommended and super addictive read.
Halloween-ish book recs
Published
Mooncustafer 