Mike Thorn's 3 favorite reads in 2023

• 2023
• 2024

Shirley Jackson’s debut novel traces the goings-on within Pepper Street, an early- to mid-twentieth-century California suburb.

Consisting mainly of banal domestic interactions among the neighborhood’s inhabitants, the novel deftly identifies psychological attacks coded into propriety. The adult characters impose their attitudes of racism, classism, and paranoia onto their children, fueling the climactic party scene’s inevitable, violent revelation.

The novel is surprisingly slim given the Dickensian size of its ensemble. Every scene crackles with thematic purpose and narrative tension. Though not a horror book in the traditional sense, it still contains all the menace and suspense of Jackson’s later Gothic fiction, showcasing what would become her career-long fixation on human evil. 

The Subjugated Beast begins with a classic Gothic setup: an inheritance clause compels a young woman, Curl, to live in the gloomy Castle Grim with her Uncle Paul and Aunt Beatrice.

Holed up in that castle, the impotent and monomaniacal Paul subjects Beatrice to a perverse scientific experiment, wherein she is forced to subsist solely on raw meat. Paul hopes that over time this diet will unlock the woman’s inner beast, a property he believes thrives “deep beneath the undisputed consciousness of each of us.”

Ryan writes in lucidly vivid prose and demonstrates full mastery of plot, character, and atmosphere. Her novel is replete with fascinating reflections on many of horror’s pervading philosophical concerns, such as knowledge and its limitations, science versus spiritualism, and evil as something innate or external.   

Simone Weil’s Gravity and Grace is an essential work of Christian mysticism written in profound, aphoristic style that aligns with its main philosophical tenets. Weil argues that emptying, or even nullifying, oneself is imperative in the context of true faith. God does not exist within the limited parameters of human subjectivity and the “created” world, so it stands to reason that the only way to apprehend God is through voiding. Indeed, even faith itself must be sacrificed under Weil’s philosophy, because to believe in something is to avoid nothing.

This book’s conviction is hauntingly persuasive. Its aphorisms accumulate to form a statement of radical belief. I’m deeply moved by Weil’s brilliance, commitment, and clarity of thought.