Why am I passionate about this?

I grew up on a tiny peninsula in Downeast Maine, an evocative and rugged place, both lovely and haunting. As a girl, walking home late down gravel roads through an encompassing darkness I’ve found nowhere else, I sensed the world’s dangers long before I knew how to articulate them. Surrounded by woods, water, and unnerving quiet broken by the fox’s scream and rustling branches, I began to write. I sought out strange and unsettling books by Shirley Jackson and Stephen King (his home just a few towns away from mine) that left their mark. Storytelling became a way to process and explore what keeps me up at night. 


I wrote

The Blue Maiden

By Anna Noyes,

Book cover of The Blue Maiden

What is my book about?

Sisters Beata and Ulrika are outcasts on their home of Sweden’s Berggrund Island: oppositional, imaginative and wild. They are obsessed…

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The books I picked & why

Book cover of The Haunting of Hill House

Anna Noyes Why did I love this book?

For me, this is the book that started it all. When I was 10 years old, I stole it from my Granny’s shelf, curled in her BarcaLounger, and finished in one ravenous sitting.

The world I emerged into was changed: the main character Nell’s spiraling, exuberant, increasingly unhinged interiority echoed in my mind. I remember walking afterward through the Maine woods, the green more vivid than ever before, pulsing with a new sense of menace and aliveness.

Each sentence in this masterpiece about a sentient, malevolent house is electric, and if I could only read one paragraph for the rest of my life, it would be this novel’s opening. 

By Shirley Jackson,

Why should I read it?

37 authors picked The Haunting of Hill House as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

Part of a new six-volume series of the best in classic horror, selected by Academy Award-winning director of The Shape of Water Guillermo del Toro

Filmmaker and longtime horror literature fan Guillermo del Toro serves as the curator for the Penguin Horror series, a new collection of classic tales and poems by masters of the genre. Included here are some of del Toro's favorites, from Mary Shelley's Frankenstein and Ray Russell's short story "Sardonicus," considered by Stephen King to be "perhaps the finest example of the modern Gothic ever written," to Shirley Jackson's The Haunting of Hill House and stories…


Book cover of Fever Dream

Anna Noyes Why did I love this book?

As the title suggests, this book lingers like a disquieting dream. A mother to a toddler myself, I think of what the protagonist Amanda calls the “rescue distance” often – the ground between herself and her child, should something perilous occur.

This book distills maternal protectiveness and anxiety into something as potent as poison or as powerful as a curse. It makes me want to look over my shoulder, lock the doors, draw the blinds. It carries an air of contagion. I can think of few other reads that evoke such a visceral reaction with such subtle strokes.

By Samanta Schweblin, Megan McDowell (translator),

Why should I read it?

5 authors picked Fever Dream as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

SHORTLISTED FOR THE MAN BOOKER INTERNATIONAL PRIZE 2017

'The book I wish I had written' Lisa Taddeo, author of Three Women and Animal

A young woman named Amanda lies dying in a remote Argentinian hospital. A boy named David sits beside her.

She's not his mother. He's not her child.

At David's ever more insistent prompting, Amanda recounts a series of events from the apparently recent past, a conversation that opens a chest of horrors. Together, they tell a haunting story of broken souls, toxins, and the power and desperation of family.

A chilling tale of maternal anxiety and ecological…


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Book cover of The Woman at the Wheel

The Woman at the Wheel by Penny Haw,

Inspiring historical fiction based on the real life of Bertha Benz, whose husband built the first prototype automobile, which eventually evolved into the Mercedes-Benz marque.

"Unfortunately, only a girl again."

From a young age, Cäcilie Bertha Ringer is fascinated by her father's work as a master builder in Pforzheim, Germany.…

Book cover of Things We Lost in the Fire: Stories

Anna Noyes Why did I love this book?

Horrifying, brutal, sinuous, and uncanny, this one floored me. It evokes the peril of girlhood and womanhood with unwavering intensity.

Each story is fresh and unexpected, yet also timeless, rich with wisdom and mythology centuries old. Steeped in painful history, past atrocities twine with the present to nightmarish effect.

Mariana EnrĂ­quez is part of a new vanguard of Argentine and Latin American Gothic writers alongside Samanta Schweblin. Their writing, born from real-world horrors, is among the most thrilling discoveries I’ve made in years. 

By Mariana EnrĂ­quez, Megan McDowell (translator),

Why should I read it?

3 authors picked Things We Lost in the Fire as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

'A portrait of a world in fragments, a mirrorball made of razor blades' Guardian

Sleep-deprived fathers conjuring phantoms; sharp-toothed children and stolen skulls; persecuted young women drawn to self-immolation. Organized crime sits side-by-side with the occult in Buenos Aires - a place where reality and the preternatural fuse into strange, new shapes. These stories follow the wayward and downtrodden, revealing the scars of Argentina's dictatorship and the ghosts and traumas that have settled in the minds of its people. Provocative, brutal and uncanny, Things We Lost in the Fire is a paragon of contemporary Gothic from a writer of singular…


Book cover of Beloved

Anna Noyes Why did I love this book?

The language of Beloved is so lush, singular, and encompassing that it defies description. It must be experienced.

This book pulsates with troubled energy, possession, obsession, grief, rage, and life force. It is one of the most haunted – and haunting – novels I’ve ever read, an unflinching, deeply embodied account of slavery and its wake. The book feels like a living thing, alert and hungry. It contains the depths of our violence and sorrow, but also exaltation, healing, profound love and tenderness.

By Toni Morrison,

Why should I read it?

40 authors picked Beloved as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

'Toni Morrison was a giant of her times and ours... Beloved is a heart-breaking testimony to the ongoing ravages of slavery, and should be read by all' Margaret Atwood, New York Times

Discover this beautiful gift edition of Toni Morrison's prize-winning contemporary classic Beloved

It is the mid-1800s and as slavery looks to be coming to an end, Sethe is haunted by the violent trauma it wrought on her former enslaved life at Sweet Home, Kentucky. Her dead baby daughter, whose tombstone bears the single word, Beloved, returns as a spectre to punish her mother, but also to elicit her…


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Book cover of Everything We Had: A Novel of the Pacific Air War November-December 1941

Everything We Had by Tom Burkhalter,

War is coming to the Pacific. The Japanese will come south within days, seeking to seize the oil- and mineral-rich islands of the Dutch East Indies. Directly astride their path to conquest lie the Philippines, at that time an American protectorate. 

Two brothers, Jack and Charlie Davis, are part of…

Book cover of All the Birds, Singing

Anna Noyes Why did I love this book?

Elements of this book feel made for me – a woman, alone on her sheep farm on a remote British island, faces predatory danger that straddles the line between real and imagined, internal and external. The writing is pure poetry, each detail telegraphing threat.

A stark natural world surrounds and encroaches on the home that strong, complex, reclusive Jake shares with her dog named Dog (as soon as this good boy was introduced, the stakes ratcheted). I can’t shake this frightening and moving exploration of misogyny, patriarchal terror, and trauma.

By Evie Wyld,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked All the Birds, Singing as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

Jake Whyte is the sole resident of an old farmhouse on an unnamed British island, a place of ceaseless rains and battering winds. It's just her, her untamed companion, Dog, and a flock of sheep. Which is how she wanted it to be. But something is coming for the sheep - every few nights it picks one off, leaves it in rags.

It could be anything. There are foxes in the woods, a strange boy and a strange man, rumours of an obscure, formidable beast. And there is Jake's unknown past, perhaps breaking into the present, a story hidden thousands…


Explore my book 😀

The Blue Maiden

By Anna Noyes,

Book cover of The Blue Maiden

What is my book about?

Sisters Beata and Ulrika are outcasts on their home of Sweden’s Berggrund Island: oppositional, imaginative and wild. They are obsessed with the lore and legend of the island’s dark past – where generations ago, women stood accused of witchcraft – and their dead mother, about whom their pastor father refuses to speak.

As the girls come of age, straining against the strictures of their community, their rebellions twist and sharpen. When an enigmatic stranger arrives at their door, his presence threatens their family bond and unearths long-buried truths. A Nordic Gothic laced with the horrors of life in a patriarchy both hostile to and reliant on its women, The Blue Maiden is a story of haunted history, lost lineage, and resilience. 

Book cover of The Haunting of Hill House
Book cover of Fever Dream
Book cover of Things We Lost in the Fire: Stories

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Interested in Ohio, Argentina, and haunted houses?

Ohio 80 books
Argentina 63 books
Haunted Houses 85 books