bloodygranuaile | Entries tagged with horror

The ideal atmospheric reading choice here would have been to save this for a trip to New York, but as I don’t have one planned, I went ahead and read Cat Scully’s debut novel, Below the Grand Hotel, this past week–mostly in Salem, which I guess is acceptable because all horror novels are thematically appropriate for Salem. But this is a very New York sort of novel anyway, because it’s about the art scene and fancy hotels in New York in the 1920s, and nowhere is ever as 1920s as New York.

The comp titles for this book were The Great Gatsby and Hellraiser, which aren’t wrong, per se, but for me the other work it reminded me of the most was probably Libba Bray’s Diviners series. This is praise; I thoroughly enjoyed the Diviners series even though I was losing interest in YA by the time the last book came out.

Our protagonist in Below the Grand Hotel is Mabel Rose Dixon, a young woman from Georgia who, as so many artists have before and since, came to New York to seek her fortune in the performing arts. Mabel has recently been rejected as a Ziegfield Follies girl, not due to lack of talent but due to lack of the things Mr. Ziegfield really wants in his Follies, which is an extremely specific physical look and compliance with his sexually exploitative management style. Mabel is therefore–well, not forced, but certainly incentivized–to put her stage magician skills to unorthodox use as a pickpocket in order to fund her ability to keep body and soul together while she works to break into the industry. Unfortunately, Mabel goes after the wrong bit of jewelry, and body and soul thus become forcibly separated in a nasty deal with some demons within the Grand Hotel, a labyrinthine pocket universe that draws in desperate people and never lets them back out.

The book is part video-game-like mystery as Mabel navigates both the physical hotel and the web of secrets and lies that she is now entangled in, trying to figure out a way to not only escape the hotel herself but to free a shifting arrangement of other people’s souls as well. It’s also part meditation on the challenges and paradoxes of trying to be an artist and make art in an industry where not only is the art a commodity, but celebrity culture means that the artists become commodities themselves as well–and those commodities are subject to the rapid pace of both the whims of fashion and technological change. Scully really digs into what would make selling your soul to demons to perform in a murder hotel you can never leave appealing, which is, essentially, the alternative it provides to trying to scrape together a living in the supposedly non-demonic art world. Also there’s a lot of gore; every time Mabel gets to take a bath and change her clothes it’s like two pages before she’s covered head to toe in viscera again. It was a lot of fun.

This year I did Dracula Daily but unsubscribed from the actual Dracula Daily substack, instead reading along in my ancient copy of The Essential Dracula, an annotated version of the book with notes and a bunch of front and end matter by Radu T. Florescu and Raymond McNally, who were apparently bigshot Dracula scholars in the ‘70s or thereabouts.

The book itself continues to be phenomenal even reading it the third year in a row. Every year I find myself getting excited about stuff I’d completely forgotten from the previous year. I’m excited to rediscover next year what I’ve already forgotten since May.

The annotated version is honestly hilarious. Some of the annotations are really cool and interesting, because they’re about what was in Bram Stoker’s notes, which these editors seem to have been the first published people to have access to. Others are sort of goofy reading comprehension tidbits, and some are just the editors’ personal opinions on stuff. The book comes with an “annotated filmography,” which provides an interesting tour of vampire movies (not just Dracula adaptations) up to somewhere around when the Interview with the Vampire movie was announced but was still expected to star John Travolta. It is also shamelessly full of the editors’ personal opinions, as is the bibliography, which is even funnier because the bibliography contains the editors’ own books (unsurprisingly, they think their own books are great). There is also an interestingly dated guide to doing “Dracula tours” of England and what was at the time of publication the Socialist Republic of Romania.

Anyway, I am very glad I read this even if it’s not necessarily something I’d recommend to someone who’s new to Dracula today. It’s a great historical piece from the history of people being obsessed with Dracula, and also you get to read Dracula again.

Managed to sneak in a quick spooky season read, which I had picked up at Readercon over the summer: Sarah Monette’s A Theory of Haunting, a novella about the whimsically named murder house Thirdhop Scarp.

Our reluctant protagonist is one Kyle Murchison Booth, a shy archivist at an institution called the Parrington Museum, which appears to be somewhere in New York State. Kyle does not like small talk, or Spiritualism, or really much of anyone or anything, although more in a chronically anxious way than a mean one. Kyle really does not like the assignment he gets at the beginning of the story: the Parrington heir who funds the museum, who is basically normal if a bit bitchy, wants him to extract her extremely gullible sister from the circles of the guy who just bought Thirdhop Scarp, a slick and fraudulent occultist named, supposedly, Marcus Oleander.

To this end, Marcus Oleander has been somehow induced to hire Kyle to catalogue the four different messy occult collections Oleander has acquired and dumped in the library at the house. Kyle certainly finds enough proof of fraudulence to convince any reasonable person that Oleander is a fraud, but there’s really no such thing as enough proof of fraudulence to render the infinitely credulous Grisela Parrington skeptical about anyone or anything, so instead Kyle is stuck there weekend after weekend unwillingly uncovering the mysterious history of the house and getting dragged into seances and witnessing the power playing within Oleander’s pompously named occult society, and all sorts of other nonsense he’d rather not be doing. With the help of the adolescent medium Alexis, and despite the interference of Alexis’ guardians and various other unsavory characters that constitute Oleander’s posse, Kyle has to identify and then disarm whatever in the house keeps killing people before it, well, kills all of them.

This may not have been the most original work ever written–which is hard to do with haunted house stories; Shirley Jackson kind of solved the genre forever, in my opinion–but it was certainly entertaining and spooked me a bit at the end. My only critique is something about it feels more like Americans trying to write English stories than it does like an actual American story, despite the very classic American haunted house story features, like an “old” house that has only had three owners and was built barely 80 years ago. Some of this might be the vaguely steampunk quality to some of the names, like “Griselda Parrington,” and some of it might be that I was thrown off by how often the main character says “Er,” which I don’t think I’ve ever heard someone with a New York or in fact any kind of American accent say. We say “Uh” because if you said “Er” with an American accent that would imply that you were making an R sound, which nobody does; the English just spell “Uh” as “Er” because that’s how they’d pronounce “Er.” But regardless of what country it takes place in, it’s a nice 130 pages of atmospheric family secrets and occult happenings and sudden deaths and general mystery for tweedy nerds. I enjoyed it a lot and might check out the other short stories featuring Kyle Murchison Booth, who I gather is a recurring Sarah Monette character.

I have spent the last six months once again reading Dracula via email! I didn’t realize I didn’t have to sign up again to do another go-round of Dracula Daily; next year I think I will unsubscribe and follow along in my weird old annotated copy. (I am also being threatened with another round of The Beetle Weekly and that I think I simply could not survive.)

Anyway, Dracula continues to be a great story, about which most pop culture tropes and certainly nearly all film adaptations are a tragedy and a waste. Lucy and Jonathan especially are consistently done dirty. All the humor is stripped, a thing I think is more and more a problem every time I read the book and run across the corn speech, or Dracula’s unseasonable straw hat. Reading this book in small chunks with a bunch of insane Tumblrites is both a lot of fun and really ends up highlighting how a lot of mainstream and even academic Dracula discourse is at least as bonkers and wrong-headed as your average Tumblr-dwelling ball of mental illnesses.

Anyway it’s just. So good. The character work is so good. The horror is so good. It’s got a bunch of fucked-up Victorian English shit but unlike a lot of fucked-up Victorian English lit it’s got so much heart. This one is a classic for a reason.

A few Christmases ago I picked up a beautifully bound hardback copy of J. Sheridan Le Fanu’s Carmilla at the Strand, and then last year I subscribed to Carmilla Weekly rather than read it. This year, I decided reading the pretty book would be more fun!

Though it’s only been a year since my last reread, I once again forgot just how gay this book is. It is well-known that 19th century vampires stories–of which there are many, though for some reason every one that isn’t Dracula likes to present itself as the singular and only precursor to Dracula–are full of homoerotic subtext, and that knowledge exerts such a pull on my brain that every time I step away from Carmilla for like five seconds I apparently start thinking that it applies here, too. This is incorrect. It is not subtext. I swear to God one of these years I will remember that the homoeroticism in this one is just regular text.

At any rate, it’s such an excellent little creepy read! I swear it gets better every time I read it. Just a perfect little bite-size (heh) vampire story for October.

Several years ago a friend who knew I was interested in bananas Victorian Gothics recommended me The Beetle, so I was excited when, on the heels of the success of Dracula Daily, some enterprising fellow fan of goofy Victorian Gothics started The Beetle Weekly, specifically promising us more of everything that made Dracula bad and less of anything that made Dracula good, even though The Beetle outsold Dracula by like a factor of four the year it was released.

The Beetle starts off relatively strong with a sympathetic story of a down-on-his luck clerk, Robert Holt, who has been reduced to vagrancy via the pitiless capitalism of pre-welfare-state Britain and finds himself, in desperation, crawling through the open window of an apparently uninhabited house. He is incorrect about the uninhabited state of the house and that is where the horrors begin, and also it is all downhill from there, because the horrors are fucking goofy and also pretty racist. Bobert (as he is known to fandom) is hypnotized by an ambiguously gendered brown person whomst can also shape-shift into a giant scarab beetle, and this beetle/person sends Bobert to burglarize the house of an up-and-coming statesman named Paul Lessingham, even though Bobert does not actually have any burglarizing skills, being actually an unemployed clerk. This begins a comedy of errors–that thinks it’s a thrilling horror story–of Bobert breaking ineptly into Paul Lessingham’s house to steal his letters, Paul Lessingham having a mental breakdown when Bobert yells “THE BEETLE!” at him, and a mostly-nude Bobert running hypnotizedly away and straight into Paul’s romantic rival and our second narrator, absolute shithead Sydney Atherton.

Sydney Atherton is an “inventor” who is in love with Marjorie Lindon, his childhood friend who has become secretly engaged to Paul Lessingham, and who ought to be but is not in love with Dora Grayling, a wealthy young maiden who wants to marry Atherton and fund all his horrible inventions, like death gas for conquering South America. They have some very bizarre interactions, including one where Dora wants Sydney to “demonstrate” the death gas and then gets upset when he uses it to kill a random cat that he picked up off the street and decided was Paul Lessingham’s cat. There is some third person around who also is in love with Marjorie Lindon and Sydney almost kills him by continually Fortifying His Nerves with hard liquors on an empty stomach. Atherton hates Lessingham and continually calls him “the Apostle” which is sort of appropriate given how obnoxiously sanctimonious Lessingham is, except that Sydney is even more obnoxious. For some absolutely inexplicable reason everybody keeps coming to Sydney for like, life advice and stuff–Marjorie, Dora, Marjorie’s dad, and even Paul! Most of the things they want advice on are how to deal with one or more of the other people coming to Sydney for advice, so he kind of bumbles around letting them all eavesdrop on each other while hiding in his death-gas-inventing studio.

Things take a twist when a nearly-dead Bobert passes out in front of Marjorie’s house and she, taking over the narration, takes him in and gives him a bath and some food and calls Sydney to see what the heck she should do about this babbling unfortunate that she picked up because she is sooo compassionate and charitable even though she’s actually never passed up a chance to be nasty to anyone once in this entire book. Sydney, having run into Bobert previously and also been the subject of some completely unsolicited confessions from “the Apostle,” is super jazzed to know exactly what Bobert is babbling about but refuses to tell Marjorie about it because he’s a vicious little misogynist, so instead all he tells her is that it’s terribly dangerous and he and Bobert are going out and can he borrow a revolver and also she can’t come because it’s too dangerous, so obviously she insists upon going because he won’t actually tell her what’s too dangerous (she does not, however, bring a revolver, even though the one thing she does know about this situation is that Sydney thinks it’s the kind of dangerous that can be helped with a revolver). This is how Marjorie gets lost in the house that hypnotized Bobert earlier.

From here we move to our last narrator, the previously unintroduced solicitor Augustus Champnell, because what’s a nineteenth century Gothic without a serious, sober-minded solicitor to document that all the horrors are real and definitely not wild fancies? It’s not like we have to trust Sydney, both because he’s a mad scientist who’s been huffing poison gases or whatever and because far from a disinterested party. Paul and Sydney both immediately seek the services of Champnell in bailing them out of whatever nonsense they’re involved in, which is how we get Paul’s full backstory, finally–a jaw-droppingly racist lurid fantasy of evil Isis-worshiping Arabs in colonized Egypt who capture white Christian Englishwomen and sometimes Englishmen and subject them to various tortures and sexual assaults and such before offering them up to a giant beetle idol as human sacrifices and burning them alive. All very normal. Anyway, after hearing this remarkable story, and doing some extremely funny Marx Brothers-sounding shit where the three grown men bounce around town in a hansom cab built for only two passengers, Champnell, Atherton, and Lessingham chase the Beetle and Bobert and a captive Marjorie all around southern England in a variety of hansoms, carriages, and trains, until the Beetle is finally defeated via an off-screen train crash and also the underground Beetle Isis cult human sacrifice caves over in Egypt coincidentally explode for no documented reason whatsoever. A solicitor is telling us this so you know it’s very serious and not at all funny business.

Truly this book is awful in every way nineteenth century British writing can be awful all at once, and then some. I had so much fun reading it along with a bunch of insane people on Tumblr and Discord so we could all make fun of it endlessly and try to figure out what in the name of Aryan Jesus Richard Marsh was thinking. Just a remarkable feat of bad Victoriana.

This spring, after some initial resistance, I jumped onto the Dracula Daily bandwagon, and as such have been reading Bram Stoker’s 1982 Gothic masterpiece Dracula in little bits and pieces, some out of order, more days than not for the past few months. Though I have read Dracula before, there was definitely something fun and different about reading it in real-time, playing with the epistolary form by waiting for emails from my dear friends about what they’d been up to, and being in a fandom/giant book club with the most insane minds on the Internet via the Dracula Daily tag on Tumblr. These past six months have been so much fun, and have really forced me to slow down and notice so many delicious and weird little things about the book that usually get lost when I just mainline the whole novel by myself in a few days with no one to discuss it with. It was, of course, also lovely watching so many new readers discover all the ways in which the novel differs from the many pop culture variations on it, and get outraged together over the ways in which movies and such have consistently done Lucy and Jonathan dirty, made Dracula and Van Helsing inexplicably sexy instead of the goofy old men they are, and, most unforgivably, always cut our “laconic,” Winchester-wielding Texas gentleman Quincey Morris.

One of the things that I think was great about this slow, discussion-filled read-through was that it ended up really highlighting not just overlook triumph of craft like the dry humor and the slow mounting terror of Jonathan and Lucy’s plotlines, but it also gave us enough room to simultaneously explore just how very much this story is rooted in being about a bunch of English people in the 1890s, and the ways in which they still are very relatable and relevant to situations and people we know today–Jonathan the young lawyer on his first real business trip, steadfastly ignoring how weird everything is because he can’t afford to be rude or fuck up; Seward the overpromoted young whiz kid making a podcast (with voices) and clinging to his emotional support lancet because he is actually a huge dork; hypercompetent Mina dealing with the guilt and terror by throwing herself into admin/secretarial tasks that keep everyone organized. Every member of Anti-Vampire Aktion is a nerdy jewel of classic literature and it would be nice if someday, someone adapted them all for screen without wholesale replacing them with completely unrecognizable simulacra.

But also: the chicken paprika recipe! Dracula’s unseasonable straw hat! The disrespectful zookeeper! Seeing from Jonathan’s violent demeanor that he was English! VAN HELSING’S CORN METAPHORS. I had forgotten how fucking funny this book is! It’s nice to read with a population that is primed to zero in on everything that could be joked about and ensure it is joked about good and hard. 10/10 would take a lit class with Tumblr University again.

In preparation for Nona I read Harrow the Ninth for the third time. This time I tried to read it more slowly, even though my reading-slowly-on-purpose skills have somewhat deteriorated over the years. I don’t think I’m quite clever enough to have figured out who’s in the last section, but I will only live in ignorance for another week or so. (I don’t usually try to guess twists, I just want to see how they happen, but I’ve been wondering Who Is Nona for like a year now so I tried to pay attention.)

Even knowing the big reveals, this was still a tricksy little hobbit of a book. Only part of this is due to the protagonist being possibly-insane-possibly-haunted-definitely-unwell; the rest is due to much of the rest of the cast also being possibly insane, haunted, dead, and various other things (and definitely unwell). God continues to be just some guy, and extremely cringe to boot. I can’t wait for the next book.

Despite having been somewhat disappointed in The Witches of New York I decided that I was indeed going to add All The Witch Books Whose Titles I Keep Getting Mixed Up to my library holds list, and thus my Christmas plane reading this weekend ended up being Alexis Henderson’s horror novel The Year of the Witching.

It is perhaps a mark of how tired I am with everything that when I read the basic premise–feminist horror-fantasy about a misogynistic, Puritan-esque society getting its comeuppance–I was not quite as excited as I have historically been about that sort of thing and was instead worried that it would be, perhaps, a bit done, or perhaps that it would have the same sort of glib girl-power sensibility as Witches of New York that thought it was fresher and more radical than it was. But I had heard only good things about The Year of the Witching whereas I had in fact heard in advance that Witches of New York was a bit, hm, white.

I need not have worried, because even with living here in Massachusetts, a 45-minute drive from the tasteless Gothic Disneyland of Salem, where I learn stuff about Puritans all the livelong day whether I care about it or not (I do, though; they were interesting), The Year of the Witching was still weird and new and different. For starters, the religion of Bethel, while in many respects matching quite closely what I’ve learned about agrarian Puritan colonies in the times of the witch trials, a lot of it is… bloodier. Animal sacrifice features prominently, and marriages are marked by having a sigil cut into the bride’s forehead, in a ceremony known as “cutting.” Polygamy is common, with the “prophets”--the high-ranking men of the church–claiming more wives the higher up the hierarchy they are. Bethel is a very, very closed community, living in fear of the Darkwoods, where the Mother and her malevolent witch followers are in power, and of the “heathen” cities of the rest of the world. Obviously as readers we are inclined to be at least a bit Team Darkwoods even though we know this is a horror novel and the malevolent witches are probably going to do malevolent stuff.

Our protagonist, Immanuelle, is the orphan daughter of two teenagers who were executed for a series of crimes that centered on their trying to be together instead of quietly letting Immanuelle’s mum get sold off at the tender age of 16 to the current Prophet, who is both mean and several years her senior. Admittedly this series of crimes did involve Immanuelle’s mom trying to murder the Prophet with his own sacred dagger but all things considered, this was a sensible and righteous course of action and I support it fully. Immanuelle has thus grown up under the shadow of her mother’s excommunication and is not very popular. However, despite her attempts to keep her head down and not make a fuss, Immanuelle finds herself all mixed up in a series of horrifying plagues that start afflicting the town, and is stuck in the role of “only person who can stop them” since they are definitely mixed up with her mother’s history, if she can only figure out how. As such, with periodic help from her obligatory male love interest (the prophet’s son and heir, whomst has questions about what a dick his father is), Immanuelle has to uncover her family history and set Bethel on a path to, to put it bluntly, not being the sort of place that people wind up with good reasons to set horrible plagues upon.

Overall I found this book to be pleasantly creepy and quite engaging. It certainly had some familiar beats but mostly was able to keep me wondering what fucked-up thing was going to happen next.

While I generally consider my fanfiction days to be behind me, I cannot avoid periodically dipping my toes into the world of reimagined 19th century Gothic classics, although as I get older and crankier I am finding myself with less and less patience for the ones that I think are done poorly or betray a shallow understanding of their source material. That does still leave me plenty to work with, though, whether it’s sensationalistic TV mashups like Penny Dreadful (minus the last two episodes of Season 2, which we will pretend never happened) or experimental niche content like that Carmilla webseries I totally intend to watch one of these days. So when I saw Silvia Moreno-Garcia posting on Twitter about publishing an English translation of a cult Mexican queer horror novella about the voyage of the Demeter, The Route of Ice and Salt, I had one moment of “Am I really going to pay twenty whole US dollars for gay Dracula fanfiction?” and then promptly answered myself “Yes.”

The Route of Ice and Salt is a strange little book, largely about dreams and in a self-consciously literary style that is probably going to read as a bit pretentious if you’re not in the mood for it, especially in the beginning when it’s not clear what’s actually going on yet other than that the captain is extremely horny and also having weird dreams about ship’s rats and the two are uncomfortably closely related. After the first third or so of the book, things take a little bit more of a discernable shape than “Gothic means mucking about with a bunch of taboo stuff” as the horrors of the Demeter’s voyage unfold outside the captain’s imagination as well as within it. The men go mad in various ways and disappear as the ship fills with fog, and white rats that fight the usual gray ship’s rats, and assorted types of bad weather, and other things that variously distract from or exacerbate the captain’s generally tortured emotional state. Ultimately, the captain has to deal with the demons from his past--here the trauma of his first lover, Mikhail, being killed by a mob and his corpse subjected to the sort of degradations that Eastern European folk beliefs demanded to make “safe” the burials of “unnatural” people--in order to deal with the demon in his present, i.e., the vampire in the cargo hold, and thus sailing us into his brief cameo in the pages of Dracula, lashed to the wheel of an empty ship, with only his ship’s log to tell what happened.

Overall: Very creepy, very horny, to the point where there’s an afterword by Poppy Z. Brite even though he retired from horror like 20 years ago. I have only read one Poppy Z. Brite book but I feel like you either understand what I mean by “Poppy Z. Brite levels of creepy + horny + gay” or you don’t, but anyway, this book is that.

Also, the actual book itself is lovely, with big fancy chapter headings and the obligatory “this is a book about ships” sort of fonts, and claustrophobically wide margins.

Sometime over the winter a friend who was aware of my “only reading about goths and lesbians and goth lesbians” challenge for 2020 recommended very strongly that I read Emily M. Danforth’s Plain Bad Heroines, a 600-page horror novel about a series of grisly deaths at a turn-of-the-century private girls school and the movie about them that is being shot on the premises in the present day. Said friend even went so far as to buy me a copy (on ebook, for pandemic reasons) and send it directly to my Kindle, which is the sort of thing that happens when you’re friends with a lot of librarians. This weekend I was very tired after slogging my way through this month’s segment of Varney the Vampyre and decided I wanted to read a Gothic novel that was actually good, so the haunted girls school it was.

I had sort of assumed that the haunted house with a history of mysterious deaths meant it was going to be a ghost story and that the deaths would be mysterious murders, but it’s a bit more complicated than that. The estate--consisting of the building and grounds of Brookhants, the girls’ school; Spite Manor, the mansion of the rich family that owned the school; a stretch of woods; and a stretch of beach--are supposedly cursed, and have been since before the school was built, as such, all the deaths are merely highly improbable and grisly accidents. And since it is the land that is cursed, the horror elements are very in the creepy-crawly malevolently natural end of things--ongoing themes include rotting Black Oxford apples, mysterious black algae and seaweed, unseasonable snows, and a fuck-ton of yellowjackets.

I hate yellowjackets a lot, like a lot a lot, and so this was an excellent element to throw in the middle of a book that is otherwise full of things I mostly just think are fun, like lots of New England weirdness, some movie magic, some writing and history nerdery, lots of meta-storytelling, excellent jokes, and many very well-dressed lesbians. It made it actually very scary.

I ended up eating through the whole book in about 48 hours, of which my only regret is that I got so into the book that I didn’t realize how late it was on Saturday and forgot to take a bath, which would have been extra deliciously creepy at certain points. I would absolutely have freaked myself the fuck out (and probably dropped the Kindle into the bath).

The book is big and sprawling and structurally complicated, jumping around to different timelines and perspectives, tracing out the lives and deaths of at least half a dozen viewpoint characters over more than a century. The mysterious deaths that anchor the story are the grisly death-by-yellowjackets of Flo and Clara, a pair of teenage lovers at Brookhants and the leaders of the Plain Bad Heroines society, a fan club for the bestselling memoir The Story of Mary MacLane. However, we really don’t get much about Flo and Clara, except as objects of discussion from the other characters. Our main viewpoint characters in the 1902 timeline are Eleanor Faderman, a fellow student who wasn’t actually friends with Flo and Clara but gets obsessed with The Story of Mary MacLane after the girls’ deaths; Libbie Brookhants, the school principal; and Alexandra “Alex the Flirt” Trills, a teacher at the school and functionally Libbie’s wife. In the modern timeline, we get viewpoint chapters from Audrey and Harper, the two actresses cast as Clara and Flo, and Merritt, author of the book The Happening at Brookhants and now a script consultant on the movie.

One thing I enjoyed about this book is that it’s genre-savvy enough not to go the obvious route of “we’re going to film this horror movie on location at a haunted place, it’ll be fine” and then having terrifying things happen; instead, the characters involved are all familiar enough with the history of horror cinema that when strange and dangerous things happen on set, they can’t always tell if it’s the director trying to gin up gimmicky press coverage for his haunted movie or if something more malevolent than the director is actually afoot. So there’s a lot of psychological tension and some pretty sophisticated exploration of movies and horror and Hollywood exploitation and the ethics of scaring the shit out of people for entertainment.

It’s also extremely gay, like, literally everybody in this book is gay, one of my favorite parts is when Merritt and Harper are discussing how gay was everybody really at this all-girls private school in the woods in 1902 and Merritt had to put on her historian hat and be like “intense romantic friendships were a common part of women’s college culture back then but probably most of them weren’t all that gay,” and then we go back in time and it’s like no, everyone at Brookhants was really that gay. Every character that gets more than two lines of dialogue is gay. The only straight person in this entire book is Audrey’s mother. Queer horror FTW.

I have a lot to say about this book but obviously I don’t want to give too much away in the review, which means I need more people to read this so I can enthuse about it to additional people besides the friend who very correctly recommended it to me.

My library hold for Rory Power’s Burn Our Bodies Down came in just in time for me to use it as a way to avoid watching any news on Election Night, and I knew that if it was nearly as good as Wilder Girls it would keep me sufficiently distracted for the night.

Short version: It was. I read over half the book on Tuesday night, lamentably had stuff to do Wednesday and Thursday, and polished it off Friday.

This book is about a 17-year-old girl named Margot who lives with her objectively insane mother in a dilapidated apartment in a dilapidated town somewhere out West, judging by the amount of corn (I think it might be in Nebraska somewhere). Margot and her mom’s life is neither materially abundant nor emotionally healthy, and Margot is itching to get out and find something else about the rest of her family--who they are, why they’re estranged, if they really exist--but her mom has given her literally nothing to go on, and expressly forbidden her from ever asking. This all changes when Margot finds a photo of her mother with a phone number on it, allowing her to contact her grandmother in a town called Phalene. Following another fight with her mother, Margot runs off to Phalene, which, it turns out, is also fairly dilapidated and surrounded by corn, although bits of it clearly used to be quaint. It is here that Margot meets her grandmother, who, it turns out, also seems pretty insane and won’t tell her anything; Tess, the beautiful daughter of what is currently the richest family in town, now that Margot’s family isn’t it anymore; and a handful of other people, most of whom aren’t very important.

Pretty much the first thing that happens when Margot arrives is that there’s a fire on her grandmother’s land. It turns out there was also a fire when Margot’s mother ran away seventeen years ago, and, perhaps unsurprisingly but no less satisfyingly, there will be another fire before the end of the book.

The bulk of the book is mostly Margot and Tess trying to solve the mystery of the fire and of why Margot and her mother and her grandmother look so eerily alike, more like clones of each other than regular descendants. There was also another girl who looked just like them who Margot found dead in the fire when she arrived, so that’s the mystery Margot and Tess start out trying to solve, but solving it necessarily means figuring out everything that’s going on. I don’t want to spoiler what’s going on but let’s just say I was sort of correct when I guessed “clones” but not quite in the way I was expecting. Much like Wilder Girls, it’s very atmospheric and creepy, although the atmosphere is much different--it’s got a very hot, suffocating, post-industrial Southern Gothic sort of vibe (or Midwestern Gothic? Is that a thing? Idunno, it feels Southern Gothic to me but dryer and with more corn), with its decaying small towns and multigenerational family secrets.

Anyway, if you like creepy atmospherics and dark family secrets and socially maladjusted queer protagonists and lots of fire, you will probably like Burn Our Bodies Down! I did, at least.

For some reason, even though baby bat me read a lot of Anne Rice and a lot of other weird vampire nonsense, I never got around to checking out the other big name in disturbing and sexually explicit New Orleans-based horror with vampires in, Poppy Z. Brite. Possibly Anne Rice was just Enough and I didn’t need any more of that very specific brand of wacky at the time. Possibly there are just too many vampires books for me to read them all.

Anyway, I more recently picked up a copy of Brite’s short story collection Wormwood, and figured this October would be a good time to read it, even though it is not technically a vampire novel and I am running out of time to read my annual October vampire novel. But Brite is most famous for his vampire novels, so I feel like it sort of counts.

Wormwood does not actually have any vampire stories in it at all, which surprised me a little, but it does have plenty of ghosts and zombies and other monsters and some general unexplained supernatural shenanigans, plus at least one instance of what appears to just be very bad drugs and not anything supernatural at all.

Another thing the book does not really have any of is female characters; there are a number of vessels for assorted horror-y happenings concerning the female reproductive system, but none of them have anything I would consider characterization, and half of them are already corpses or statues or whatnot by the time they appear on the page. The closest thing to a female character is probably Rosalie from The Sixth Sentinel, which for a brief shining moment I thought was going to be a story about an asexual goth, but which is instead, structurally, an abstinence-only story (albeit much better than any of the horror stories that actual evangelicals can cook up)--don’t have teen sex or your daddy will shoot your boyfriend and go to jail, and you’ll get pregnant, be forced to have an abortion, run away to an abusive relationship, and wind up an alcoholic stripper in a shabby one-bedroom in New Orleans until you’re murdered by a horny ghost! It’s actually a very good story; I found it quite funny. Anyway, while a lack of female characters defined in any way outside of sexual body horror is a longstanding problem in the horror genre, I’m not one of those people who finds that type of horror inherently misogynistic, because reproduction actually is terrifying! It’s just the character writing that sucks. The horror bits are fantastic.

The character writing is very good for all of the gay dudes that populate most of the stories and is, uh, deeply obnoxious for the straight dudes who are the viewpoint characters in a handful of them, which I cannot necessarily say is bad character writing. Short story characters aren’t always the most deeply drawn and it can be tough to both get a sense of the characters themselves and have whoever is viewpoint-ing remain cipher-y enough to make a nice easy vehicle for the story in just a couple of pages. Some of the stories take the easy route, where the narrator is the most normal person in this particular band of junkie goth musicians or whatever and is largely observing everyone, such as in A Georgia Story; in other, more impressive stories--the ones that have become more famous, I gather--the narrator is also completely batshit, like Howard in His Mouth Will Taste of Wormwood (although I do relate to the feeling of doing something that is supposed to be terribly exciting and being like “That’s it? We’re having fun now?” and this is why I rarely go to concerts), or The Sixth Sentinel’s aforementioned horny ghost.

Most of these stories were written in the late eighties or the nineties and there is often something very nineties about them, which in some cases makes them more creepy, although in other cases the language is a bit dated. They have a bit of that late-twentieth-century ennui about them sometimes, with characters who have fallen through the cracks of the end-of-history prosperity but who still seem to have plenty of time to wander aimlessly around the ungentrified squalor of cheap, rundown cities. Most of them take place in New Orleans but there is one very memorable story that takes place in New York city, which opens with a viscerally terrifying account of getting lost in the Port Authority, which is simultaneously actually hilarious given the overwrought, otherworldly language used. Like, damn, someone really fucking hates the Port Authority, and I do not blame them at all. (On the other hand, the story that takes place in Calcutta mostly just highlights the fact that we did not have sensitivity readers in 1991.) There’s also a lot of stuff that’s a bit cliche for early Goth media--lots of humorously unimpressed references to Goths, lots of characters who are struggling artists and musicians with substance abuse issues, lots of extremely gross-sounding cocktails--but it’s fun, the Classic Goth Author vibes come through real strong.

Anyway, do you like fucked-up gross shit and think it is extremely funny? Do you want to be both disturbed and amused at the same time this Halloween? Then I have got a short story collection for you!

Despite my difficulties focusing on reading fiction lately, I borrowed an ARC of Silvia Moreno-Garcia’s Mexican Gothic from a friend, because I am a stubborn bitch and I was absolutely DETERMINED to relax at least one weekend this ridiculous summer, and that means reading YA novels by the lake in Maine, goddammit. I didn’t get to it on my last Maine trip because I just napped through that one, but I decided to put it at the top of the list for this weekend, when I went up for three days, none of which were holidays, and had a bit more reading time even if I did end up taking some naps.

Mexican Gothic was definitely a good choice for me for trying to get back into a fiction groove because it is squarely within one of my very favorite genres of all time: one in which a lovely young girl meets a tall, dark, and brooding house. (Usually there’s a dude somewhere around too, but he’s usually kind of boring.) In this case the house is named High Place and it is a full-blown crumbling eighteenth-century English mansion, inexplicably stuck in the mountains well outside Mexico City. Well, not that inexplicably; there is definitely an explanation for why an English mansion has been painstakingly constructed in the middle of Mexico, and it unsurprisingly involves some super racist rich English people.

Our heroine, Noemi, is a 22-year-old socialite and anthropology student in fashionable 1950s Mexico City, where her pastimes involve going to parties, smoking cigarettes, changing her major, and squabbling with her dad, a paint company executive. It’s all fun and games and regular-level familial dysfunction until her dad gets an extremely creepy letter from her cousin Catalina, who married a rich English guy in a scandalously rushed fashion last year and who no one has seen since he whisked her off to his ancestral mining estate in the countryside. Dad sends Noemi to investigate, to see if Catalina needs to come to the city for psychiatric treatment or something, which seems to everybody to be the most likely situation.

High Place is a masterpiece of Manderleyesque creepery, a place where everything is falling apart as the handful of obsessive weirdos inhabiting it refuse to let anything change. There is a mean and judgemental female housekeeper, a lecherous old eugenicist patriarch who everyone is terrified to cross, Catalina’s handsome but vicious husband, some brainwashed servants, and the housekeeper’s son Francis, the only person around with half a personality and therefore the obligatory male romantic lead. Also Catalina, who may or may not be mad/poisoned/suffering from tuberculosis/whatever, but at any rate isn’t allowed to be in Noemi’s company nearly as much as she’d like, and therefore winds up being a fairly minor character. There are a few normal people down in the town--like a real doctor, and the village wise woman, who apparently get along quite well, have a healthy respect for each other’ s practices, and are united in their dislike of the weird-ass English doctor who has been treating Catalina for “tuberculosis”--and… actually, that’s mostly it, there’s just doctors everywhere and nobody else.

Anyway, High Place is very, very clearly and obviously haunted, regardless of whether you believe in hauntings or not, and so Noemi has to figure out what kind of haunting it is and how it works before she can do the thing you always have to do in haunted house stories, which is put the haunting to rest. I have to say that as much as I am pleasantly familiar with all the genre stuff that Moreno-Garcia is drawing on for this book (I have read a lot of girl-meets-house books), I absolutely did not see this particular backstory of madness and murder coming. It’s quite fascinating and extremely well set up; there’s all sorts of clues in the earlier parts of the book that I just zipped past at the time but were clearly foreshadowing in hindsight. Like all good horror novels, the story is rooted deep in questions of social order and family, and just how fucked up people can get about them. Like, the obligatory romantic plotline is reasonably boring as a romantic plotline but you get invested in it anyway because in order for it to work between Noemi and Francis, Francis has to extricate himself from the house and the family, and I use the word “extricate” here very deliberately--it’s not as simple as leaving.

The book also reminded me that I know fuck-all about Mexican history; I should probably do something about that.

Anyway, this was a really fun and suspenseful addition to one of my favorite genres of fiction, and I recommend it highly if you, too, like books where stubborn young women fight evil houses (and win).

So Andrea decided to reread The Haunting of Hill House for Halloween and suggested on Twitter that this was a cool thing that all the cool kids were doing, rereading The Haunting of Hill House, because clearly it's a fun book that you want to read more than once, so I figured I should be cool too and read it for the first time, especially since I read We Have Always Lived In the Castle for the first time a few years ago and I liked that one.

The Haunting of Hill House is by Shirley Jackson (Ms. Jackson if you're nasty), author of the very famous short story The Lottery and the person the Shirley Jackson Award is given in honor of at Readercon every year. Both The Lottery and We Have Always Lived In the Castle were deeply creepy, but they still did not prepare me for the creepiness of The Haunting of Hill House, which, as you can probably guess from the title, is a haunted house story, and I am highly susceptible to haunted house stories anyway for basically the same reasons that I love wacky old houses, which is that I am an overly sensitive dork.

Even by haunted house story standards, this one is creepy because, while there is definitely something otherworldly living in Hill House, this seems to be the result of the core problem that the house itself is simply fundamentally, unreservedly evil, and has been from the moment it was built, even before it was finished being built. Its very architecture is apparently designed to psychologically torment anyone who looks at it, let alone anyone who spends time in there. It is weirdly imbued with all the psychological unhealthiness of the morbid weirdo who commissioned the thing, and it is dark and all the angles are wrong and it is buried deep in the feet of the hills and none of the doors ever stay open.

Our main characters are four people who go to stay in the house for a three-month study of paranormal phenomena; two of them are women who have experienced paranormal phenomena in the past. Our narrator is a timid, dreamy, somewhat internally spiteful oddity named Eleanor, who is thirty-two years old and reads like she’s eighteen, and I say this as someone who is both younger than thirty-two and continually feels like she’s still a teenager. Eleanor’s sense of stunted, prolonged adultulescence isn’t formed by widespread economic collapse like mine and my peers’ is; it’s instead due largely to having spent most of her adult life shut away caring for her sick and not-just-internally spiteful mother, plus an overbearing sister who treats her like a child. Eleanor basically has to steal the car and run away to get to Hill House, which is totally how functional adult families work.

When Eleanor finally arrives at Hill House, and meets Theodora and Luke and Dr. Montague, and the creepy-ass housekeeper and his creepy-ass wife, things go one of three ways in a series of exquisitely paced and plotted scenes: Sometimes, Hill House is just disorienting and unpleasant, with little supernatural activity and a lot of tilting minor annoyances, like things maybe moving just outside your peripheral vision, or just being oppressively dank and Victorian. Other times, the company and good food and occasional bout of nice weather mean that they actually are having quite a nice time, exploring the brook in the backyard or drinking brandy and playing parlor games, all shut up together in the parlor where they can safely keep an eye on each other. And sometimes, there are the manifestations, which are when shit gets really creepy: writing on the walls that calls out Eleanor by name, blood all over Theo’s room, banging noises and creepy laughter in the hallway. It’s all done in a way that is fantastically, exquisitely chilling, and even now thinking about it I have had to pull my legs to the side where I can see them because they felt unsafe all the way under the desk in the dark, and the heat vent is gently blowing on a wall hanging and the noise is making me jump out of my skin with every taptaptap of the wooden dowel on the wall, a noise that usually becomes quite invisible to me by the end of the first day of having the heat on.

But Hill House has plans for Eleanor, and they are not to scare her into leaving; they are much more sinister than that. And seeing Eleanor’s thought process change and morph as she goes totally Yellow Wallpaper on us is even more terrifying than any of the manifestations Hill House throws at her, except perhaps the one where she’s holding Theo’s hand in the dark while there’s a voice manifesting in the next room and then when the lights go on Theo’s too far away for it to have been her hand. Why that one scared the shit out of me the most I’m not sure; probably because it’s more deceptive than the more cinematic hauntings like the white, white trees against the black, black sky. In unrelated news, I’m going to bug the fuck out next time I try to wear my black shirt with the white tree on it, aren’t I.

Apologies to our beautiful shy cat Amaranth who tried to come in and meow at me in a rare display of friendliness while I was writing this review; I didn’t mean to jump out of my skin and shriek at you, it was just very bad timing. She’s probably going to hide from me for like a month now.

Anyway, I feel like this book certainly has earned its reputation as the scariest ghost story ever told, and I will not be reading it again anytime soon, although Andrea has threatened me with the movie. I don’t know if I’m strong enough.