Spooky Reads for Spooky Season: Halloween 2023!

 

Spooky Season has been in full swing for almost two full months here in the US. One of the better things my fellow Americans have done in recent decades: turning Halloween into a full two-month-long festival of ghoulish goodness!

I've been watching a lot of spooky movies, from the old school The Wolf Man to The Descent to the entire Pet Sematary cinematic universe (I re-read the novel, which remains better than any of the films, watched both film versions, even got to Pet Sematary 2, which I don't necessarily recommend, and the brand new, Pet Sematary: Bloodlines, which I do recommend). I've also been trying to branch out more internationally with films like Kandisha from France and Kaali Khuhi from India. 

And there's spooky TV, too, most excellently The Fall of the House of Usher (Mike Flanagan's fantastic take on Edgar Allan Poe) and The Changeling (based on a novel by Victor LaValle starring LaKeith Stanfield). I may write up some thoughts about my spooky cinematic adventures later, maybe sometime before my horror and philosophy students present their films on November 16! (stay tuned for details on that)

But for now, here are a few of my spooky reads for spooky season 2023! Happy Halloween!

The Only Good Indians by Stephen Graham Jones

This is the second book by Stephen Graham Jones that I've read, after My Heart is a Chainsaw. I really liked both of them, although this one is a bit less fun and maybe more creepy.

In The Only Good Indians, we follow a group of friends who have an experience while hunting elk one winter. What follows is a strange tale of revenge, spookiness, and thoughts on family, ancestors, the experience of being Native, and more (to say "sins of the fathers" is too simple, but something kinda in that direction). There are three main stories, which may be worth knowing going in (I was caught off guard when the first story ends rather abruptly --or maybe the point is that stories never really end?). Anyway, it picks up with other related characters, and it all leads to a creepy conclusion that I won't spoil other than to say this is a good read for spooky season.

While I fully admit there are literary and cultural nuances I'm missing here, Jones's style is maybe a bit more in the MFA crowd direction than I tend to enjoy (I mean, he's not totally there; there is good spooky horror of a rural Montana working class variety, not just depressed rich white people in New York City or whatever). Lacking an MFA, I'm not sure I can completely describe what I mean, but maybe it's that even some of the basic descriptions require a bit of working out (I often found myself turning back to re-read passages). Or maybe I was in a weird place and not looking for this kind of subtlety when I read this? Who knows?

Anyway, I definitely see why Jones is a Big Deal in horror literature right now, and I do recommend checking him out. I'll be reading the sequel to My Heart is a Chainsaw soon (Don't Fear the Reaper), which promises if anything to be a more fun book. Speaking of fun, I have really enjoyed Jones's appearances on The Kingcast, especially his hilarious animal encounter stories, so check those out, too!

Books of Blood, Volume 2 by Clive Barker

I've been a Clive Barker fan for a long time (for Hellraiser, obviously, but also his dark fantasy novels). Last year I read Books of Blood, Vol. 1 for Spooky Season, and I figured I should read Vol. 2 this year. Great stuff, as expected.

"Dread" was fun for me because one of the main characters is an academic philosopher (although his "thought experiments" become all too real). "Hell's Event" and "Jaqueline Ess: Her Will and Testament" are both classic Clive Barker: somehow simultaneously brutal and beautiful with a touch of melancholy. "The New Murders in the Rue Morgue" is a fun riff on the classic Poe story, but with a gnarly Barker twist.

But my personal favorite has to be "The Skins of the Fathers," an excellent example of Barker's dark fantasy (where he lives most of the time: somewhere on the border of fantasy and horror). Maybe it's because I used to live in Arizona and New Mexico, but I've always thought the beautiful, brutal desert is as natural home for horror as the foggy moors of England or the eldritch forests of New England. And what if there were ancient atavistic progenitors lurking in the parched mountains of Arizona? And what if you got a bit of Barker's sympathy for "monsters" (think: Nightbreed)?

Another fun fact: a doom metal band I used to know when I lived in Albuquerque called Sandia Man had a song inspired by this story! Check it out here.

The Ballad of Black Tom by Victor LaValle

I've read this one several times, because I teach it in the horror and philosophy class mentioned above! It's a good one for an answer to Lovecraft's xenophobia and racism, as well as LaValle's own take on the genre of cosmic horror. Speaking of LaValle, I enjoyed the Apple TV version of his novel The Changeling, and I hope to read his latest book Lone Women soon.

Anyway, here's what I added to my ever-increasing Goodreads review:

Edit (Oct. 2023): Reading again for my horror and philosophy course. Not much new to add this time, just my continued appreciation for how much I love this novella and its take on cosmic horror. Maybe one thing has come more sharply into focus this time: one puzzle in Lovecraft stories like "The Call of Cthulhu" is why the cultists would want a creature like Cthulhu to come to Earth and upend human civilization, and maybe LaValle has given us something of an answer in the character of Black Tom.

The Fall of the House of Usher and Other Stories by Edgar Allan Poe

It being Spooky Season and with Mike Flanagan's adaptation of The Fall of the House of Usher coming soon, I figured it was a good excuse to revisit this volume (I knew I kept this old paperback around for a reason!). I stuck mostly with the most famous stories. Some (like "Murders in the Rue Morgue" and "The Purloined Letter") were less interesting to me than I remembered, but most were about as fun as I remembered ("Usher," "A Cask of Amontillado," "Masque of the Red Death," and of course "The Tell-Tale Heart"). This time I completely adored the less-famous story "The Black Cat." Don't be cruel to cats! Which reminds me that I was going to re-read Stephen King's Pet Sematary, too...

[edit: Dear Reader, I am pleased to inform you that the Mike Flanagan show was amazing, if not exactly a traditional adaptation of a particular story but something more like an interwoven Poe-extravaganza, and I felt like I got a lot of the Poe references I would have otherwise missed if I hadn't reread these stories. I also did re-read Pet Sematary, which just might be my favorite non-Dark Tower Stephen King novel. And of course see the Clive Barker review above for Barker's, um, unique and very Clive Barker take on "Murders in the Rue Morgue"]

Pet Sematary by Stephen King

As mentioned above, I re-read Pet Sematary this spooky season. Here's what I had to say about this trip to the ol' pet sematary.

UPDATE 2023: I'm teaching the same class this semester, but I do the 2019 movie now instead of the novel (it's just a bit too much reading to cover in a short amount of time). But I wanted to read the novel again after raving about it to my students and as a good spooky season read. So good! So much better than any of the film versions (although I appreciate the brand new prequel Pet Sematary: Bloodlines). Honestly, for all its faults, this may be one of my all-time favorites, maybe even my favorite non-Dark Tower Stephen King book. Ask me again another time, but for now I'll say, sometimes, dead is better.

Holly by Stephen King

This feels a bit like cheating, because my review of Holly was literally the post before this one. But what are you going to do? Stop reading, and check out that post? Oh, you are, well... excellent. You've fallen right into my trap, just as I, a nefarious college professor, intended! Mwahahaha!

Happy Halloween!