I think of reading horror stories as perfect armchair adrenalin-thrill-seeking. I prefer horror on the quiet side, dark and thematic, with any depiction of blood and gore in measured quantities. My favorite is historical horror with a moral edge, or underlying theme that explores who we are—good, bad, or in-between—as human beings, and how societal norms have changed from one era to another. The monsters of our imaginations are scary, but for true terror, there's nothing more frightening than the things we've done to each other throughout history. Dress society’s ills or expectations in monster clothes and write a story about them, and I’ll want to read it.
In 2018, Rachel Shepherd finds her father dead in the haunted mansion he had been renovating into a B&B. Something is wrong at Hollister House. Rachel has dreams and nightmares of a dark-haired man. After she sees the apparition of a woman who has haunted her memory for years, Rachel becomes convinced that exposing the truth about a death in 1927 holds the key to freeing Hollister House of its past. She enlists the help of her first love from a decade ago, and together they discover a mysterious mosaic mural, an album of disturbing photos, and Eve Boland’s diary.
As secrets are revealed, Rachel is about to learn that the worst horror of all may be living with the ghosts of the past.
Ira Levin is one of my favorite writers. Rosemary never should have moved into the Bramford apartments with her struggling-actor husband, or befriended their weird, pushy-old-people neighbors. She definitely shouldn’t have let her husband talk her into eating the chocolate mousse roofie. This book is a genuine masterpiece of horror, and having been raised Catholic, Satanic horror can really scare the hell out of me.
The book was a huge success. It satirized an established religion, the upwardly mobile, and motherhood, and included social commentary on the stress of being young and ambitious while weighing the choices of what has to be traded for success, or given up for motherhood. Or you can ignore all that and just read it as great horror. Rosemary’s Baby kicked off a boom in horror books in the 1960s. There’s a movie, and subsequent television and movies remakes, and a book sequel, but it’s still worth reading the original today. Ira Levin’s pared-down, straight-at-you story-telling style, which tells you exactly what you need to know, but leaves out everything you’ll never miss, is a great lesson in writing brevity.
'The Swiss watchmaker of the suspense novel' Stephen King
Rosemary Woodhouse and her struggling actor-husband, Guy, move into the Bramford, an old New York City apartment building with an ominous reputation and only elderly residents. Neighbours Roman and Minnie Castavet soon come nosing around to welcome them; despite Rosemary's reservations about their eccentricity and the weird noises that she keeps hearing, her husband starts spending time with them. Shortly after Guy lands a plum Broadway role, Rosemary becomes pregnant, and the Castavets start taking a special interest in her welfare.
As the sickened Rosemary becomes increasingly isolated, she begins to…
I can never get enough ghost and haunted house stories that have social commentary themes. This is one of the books that helped inspire my own book. Trevor Riddell’s parents are separated, and Trevor and his father move to his lumber-robber-baron grandfather’s mansion in the woods of the northwest, where Trevor’s father and aunt hope to talk their ailing father into a big-money real estate deal involving the house and land.
This book has everything I love: ghosts, intrigue, mystery, history, emotionally-complex antagonists, and epistolary story-telling through letters and journals. Woven into all that, Stein manages to insert a moral about conservation and trees (and other things I’ll let you discover on your own). Ghost stories have a history of being morality tales, and this is a modern version—true to the tradition—that I really enjoyed.
From the author of the million-copy bestselling The Art of Racing in the Raincomes the breathtaking and long-awaited new novel.
This novel centres on four generations of a once terribly wealthy and influential timber family who have fallen from grace; a mysterious yet majestic mansion, crumbling slowy into the bluff overlooking Puget Sound in Seattle; a love affair so powerful it reaches across the planes of existence; and a young man who simply wants his parents to once again experience the moment they fell in love, hoping that if can feel that emotion again, maybe they won't get divorced after…
Sure, most people might like to escape the hustle and bustle of the city, and move to a quaint village in the countryside where folkloric tradition is woven into modern life and the locals wax poetic about corn and harvest festivals. But if you do, don’t ignore the foreshadowing.
This book is an old-fashioned traditional horror story with a slow build and a New England cadence to its voice. It’s widely credited with inspiring Stephen King’s Children of the Corn and was adapted into a miniseries starring Bette Davis. I love its timeless style and milieu, with shades of The Wicker Man and Shirley Jackson’s The Lottery. There aren’t any real surprises in this novel, after years of internet children-of-the-corn memes and the like, but it’s an old comfy sweater of horror; not flashy, but it does its job.
It’s easy to identify with the classic theme of leaving behind your stressful life to pursue your dreams in some bucolic paradise and worrying about whether the move will be fruitful or die on the vine. Check out Tyrone’s The Other, too.
A family flees the crime-ridden city-and finds something worse-in "a brilliantly imagined horror story" by the New York Times-bestselling author (The Boston Globe).
After watching his asthmatic daughter suffer in the foul city air, Theodore Constantine decides to get back to the land. When he and his wife search New England for the perfect nineteenth-century home, they find no township more charming, no countryside more idyllic than the farming village of Cornwall Coombe. Here they begin a new life: simple, pure, close to nature-and ultimately more terrifying than Manhattan's darkest alley.
When the Constantines win the friendship of the town…
Written in a documentary style, this short novel is about an early 70s folk-rock band being interviewed about the summer they moved into a rambling, multi-era English country manor to work on their last album—and the mysterious happenings that occurred. There’s a beautiful musician dipping his hand into spells and metaphysics, a mysterious girl who shows up out of nowhere, and ancient folkloric echoes of a different era and place, manifesting in hidden passageways, time-and-space-bending ancient libraries, and a magic barrow in the woods. Hand is a prolific, award-winning author, and this is my favorite book of hers.
I love how she leaves the reader to make up their own mind about what exactly happened, and who or what some of the players are, never tying the story up in a pretty bow of explanations. It’s also a perfect reminiscence of the romance of the music scene in the early 1970s. Tee up some early 70s folk-influenced tunes for ambiance while reading this one.
After the tragic and mysterious death of one of their founding members, the young musicians in a British acid-folk band hole up at Wylding Hall, an ancient country house with its own dark secrets. There they record the classic album that will make their reputation but at a terrifying cost, when Julian Blake, their lead singer, disappears within the mansion and is never seen again. Now, years later, each of the surviving musicians, their friends and lovers (including a psychic, a photographer, and the band s manager) meets with a young documentary filmmaker to tell his or her own version…
This old-fashioned thriller from 1942 is a classic ghost story with an undercurrent theme of the feminism of the time. It’s available now through Tramp Press’ Recovered Voices, one of the programs that are making available old works of literature. I love the trend of bringing old books back for new readers.
Brother and sister Roderick and Pamela buy a suspiciously-cheap house in Devon in the UK, the previous home of a dead and misogynistic artist whose daughter sold Roddy and Pamela the house. The siblings soon decide the house is haunted by revenants of the artist’s love triangle with his wife and his model/lover. When the artist’s daughter starts coming to visit, things get worse fast, but by the end of the book, every mystery is solved, discussed, and tied up with no loose ends, after a satisfying twist you might see coming.
The first half of the 20th century as a setting is like reader catnip to me. Extra points that this book was actually written then, and reflects the writing and story styles of the era. Have a pot of tea while you’re reading this book and imagine yourself speaking very properly while living on the coast of England.
A gothic, bone-chilling Irish ghost story first published in 1941 and now brought back into print. The title benefits from an introduction by well-known academic Professor Luke Gibbons and Martin Scorsese and various critics, including William K. Everson and Leonard Maltin, regard The Uninvited as one of the best ghost stories ever filmed.
Virologist Dr. Rachel Bisette sees visions of a Kachina and remembers the plane crash that killed her parents and the Dine medicine woman who saved her life. Rachel is investigating a new and lethal hantavirus spreading through the Four Corners, and believes the Kachina is calling her to join the work against the spreading pandemic.
She finds Eva Yellow Horn, a medicine woman with the key to fighting the pandemic. When Eva demonstrates ancient healing powers beyond science, Rachel recognizes her as the medicine woman who saved her life years before. Eva reveals that Rachel’s father was investigating the 1979 nuclear disaster in Church Rock, when his plane crashed, killing her parents. Now, Rachel undertakes a new investigation, but she is not alone.
“Visions of kachinas guide doctor to spiritual healing in pandemic.”
2014 Finalist in the Willa Literary Award
This is a book that once closed and last line read, my mind wandered to explore certain character motivations and potential follow-up responses. I don’t think an author has to answer every possibility, art comes into play best when the reader’s own imagination can wander within the story.
Dr. Rachel Bisette is drawn to the Four Corners to lead the search for a vaccine against a lethal pandemic. One elusive indigenous woman, Eva Yellow Horn, carries the gift of immunity. In her search…
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