Halloween Theme Read

Welcome to this year's Halloween Theme Read! I've tried to select a wide variety and to avoid titles that are on practically every top horror reads list. As always, feel free to post your reviews here and to share any other titles that you'll be reading for the season.

1. Pet Sematary by Stephen King

I think there might be a group rule that there cannot be a Halloween Read without a Stephen King book on the list ;). I haven't read much of King's work and chose this one mostly because it's under 600 pages long. I hope I chose well!

2. The Keep by F. Paul Wilson

A story of modern evil versus ancient evil, wherein Nazis and vampires do battle.

I fell in love with Wilson's Reapairman Jack novels a few years ago and have been looking for an excuse to read some of his other works.

3. The Icarus Girl by Helen Oyeyemi

A young girl visiting family in Nigeria makes a strange new friend.

4. Nightmare Abbey by Thomas Love Peacock

A short satire of Gothic novels. This one is available for free via Project Gutenberg.

5. Hellblazer: Dangerous Habits by Garth Ennis

I knew I wanted to include a comic/graphic novel on the list and a Hellblazer title was the obvious choice, but which one to choose? I went with Dangerous Habits because it's a fantastic story arc and a good place to start for those who are new to the title.

6. Amphigorey by Edward Gorey

A collection of Gorey's creepy and delightful illustrated books.

7. Fledgling by Octavia E. Butler

A SF novel about a vampire who has been genetically modified to walk in the sun.

8. The Anatomy Murders: Being the True and Spectacular History of Edinburgh's Notorious Burke and Hare and of the Man of Science Who Abetted Them in the Commission of Their Most Heinous Crimes by Lisa Rosner

A nonfiction account of men who killed people in order to sell the bodies to dissection labs.

9. There Once Lived a Woman Who Tried to Kill Her Neighbour's Baby by Ludmilla Petrushevskaya

A collection of dark fairy tales.

10. In the Miso Soup by Ryū Murakami

In this violent thriller, a man hired to guide an American tourist through Tokyo's nightlife suspects that his client may be a serial killer.

11. The Hellbound Heart by Clive Barker

The novella that was the basis for Hellraiser, one of my favorite horror films.

12. Revenge by Yoko Ogawa

A collection of interwoven horror stories.

13. Last Days by Brian Evenson

A detective who recently lost a hand is hired by a cult to solve a murder.

For anyone who is interested, I've created lists of the"official" Halloween read selections and my long list for this year's selections.

I plan my reading so I'm glad you've already posted the list! I zdwill join in with Amphigorey and maybe The Anatomy Murders.

Some good selections! I'll read at least some of these, and will post my others.

Thanks for a great list!

I'm in and I'll make my list mañana!

I started my Halloween reading a little early with Yoko Ogawa's Revenge. The tales weave in and out of each other like a snarl of hopelessly tangled strings, each one adding a new layer to the ones that preceded it.

Despite it being tagged repeatedly as "horror", I would say that the stories were more unsettling than horrific. I was reminded a bit of episodes of The Twilight Zone or The Outer Limits: strange things were happening, but I would describe them as macabre rather than terrifying. More like viewing an ossuary than a murder scene.

I do wonder at the English title of the collection, since revenge wasn't a major theme of most of the stories. I'd love to know what the original title, 寡黙な死骸 みだらな弔い, actually means, although I do like the various internet translations I got: "reticent of carcasses lewd funeral"; "Dead silent memorial service for a modest"; "Dead silent lewd funeral"; and my personal favorite, "It is the taciturn cadaver seeing, and others mourning".

Anyway, I found Revenge a solid start to my Halloween reading.

The only one on the list here that our library has is Pet Sematary, so I've checked it out.

>8 tymfos: If you do e-books, Nightmare Abbey is available from Project Gutenberg at http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/9909.

This is the third or fourth time I've read The Hellbound Heart and I continue to be impressed that Barker managed to pack so much into such a slim volume. Despite the iconic status of the Cenobites, who have a grand entrance at the beginning of the book and only brief appearances later, the true monsters of the book are Frank and Julia. Their amorality and obsessive pursuits of their desires make them more dangerous and more chilling than the people with the body modifications.

The Hellbound Heart does have a few deficiencies: Kirsty and Rory are barely more than sketches compared to the wonderfully realized Frank and Julia, and the role of the Cenobite called the Engineer is never explained. Despite these problems, I highly recommend checking this one out.

Wow. You're already pumping out the books Amanda! I might try to get to Butler's book, but I've got a lot in my queue, so no promises. Hopefully though. I like Butler's works.

Halloween reads:
By Blood We Live by Glen Duncan COMPLETED
The Graveyard Book Graphic Novel Vol 1 COMPLETED & 2 COMPLETED by Neil Gaiman.
Johannes Cabal the Necromancer by Jonathan L. Howard current
The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson COMPLETED
The Anatomy Murders by Lisa Rosner
Skin Game by James Butcher, narrated by James Marsters current
Northanger Abbey by Jane Austen, narrated by Juliet Stevenson
The Books of Magic by Neil Gaiman
Batman Arkham Asylum by Grant Morrison

>11 The_Hibernator: Butler has been on my radar for years but this will be the first one of her books I've read. What ever you windup reading, I hope you enjoy it!

>12 luvamystery65: Oooh! You've chosen some great ones! I see more than a few of my favorites there, including my favorite Batman book. Happy reading!

I chose Nightmare Abbey because it came up as a recommendation for people who liked Jane Austen's Northanger Abbey, a novel I read and loved earlier this year. While the two novels do have similarities, I found Nightmare Abbey to be much more like Candide in its skewering of the Romantic movement.

This one will probably be best appreciated by people who are pretty familiar with the Romantics, as Peacock makes many references to a number of Romantic works and based most of his characters on some of the leading names of the movement, including Percy Bysshe Shelley, Mary Shelley, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and Lord Byron. Although knowing all of the allusions aren't necessary for enjoying the book, which has some great passages, the Wikipedia page can help with some of the more esoteric passages.

While Nightmare Abbey wasn't the book I was expecting it to be, I did enjoy the book that it is. It will never be one of my all-time favorites, but its wit, and short length, will probably have me rereading it in the future.

>12 luvamystery65: How are you liking the Cabal, Ro? I loved the series, but I admit it was very weird and creepy. Can't wait for the next book in the series to come out.

So far I've read Something Wicked This Way Comes and listened to Dracula. They're both on the list -- just not this year's. I really liked both of them, and they're suitably creepy for the season.

I really liked Something Wicked This Way Comes when I read it. It's one of those rare books I consider worth a re-read, maybe audio next time.

Take equal parts Edgar Allan Poe and The Brothers Grimm, throw in a good helping of classic urban legends, and add a light dusting of the bleakness of One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich and you'll come up with something close to Ludmilla Petrushevskaya's There Once Lived a Woman Who Tried to Kill Her Neighbour's Baby.

The book is divided into four sections: "Songs of the Eastern Slavs", "Allegories", "Requims", and "Fairy Tales". I didn't much care for the stories in the first section, which seemed kind of abrupt and unfinished to me, but the stories of the remaining three sections were nearly all very good. Some of the standouts were "The New Robinson Crusoes", about a family trying to survive in the country, "The Miracle", wherein a mother considers how far she is willing to go to help her son, "The Father", concerning a man who finds his family in a most peculiar fashion, and "The Old Monk's Testament", a tale about a monk that I’m not quite sure how to summarize.

This is a strange collection that I won't read cover-to-cover again, but I wouldn't mind revisiting some of the stories in the future.

I read The Grotesque by Patrick McGrath.

Not recommended. Awful ending with much left unresolved.

>14 amanda4242: I just started Batman Arkham Asylum and it is definitely perfect for Halloween although it takes place on April Fools Day.

>16 Storeetllr: I am enjoying Johannes Cabal. I put it aside to do a shared read with someone and finish my Graveyard GNs so I can pass them onto my niece but I'm back on it. It's early on still, but I'm enjoying it.

>20 nrmay: Thanks for the warning!

A link for Gorey fans: http://the-toast.net/2015/08/17/how-to-tell-if-youre-in-edward-gorey/

It's taken me several days to sort out what I want to say about In the Miso Soup. From the description, tags, and cover, I was half expecting graphic splatterpunk, but was instead treated to a suspenseful, philosophical, and sometimes poignant novel...that happened to have a moderately long scene of graphic violence in the middle.

This one is my favorite Halloween read so far and will possibly make it into my top 10 favorite reads of the year.

The Icarus Girl is about a lonely, introverted girl named Jess, who is the daughter of a Nigerian mother and English father. She never quite fits in with the kids at school and it isn't until a trip to visit family in Nigeria that she makes a friend, the mysterious TillyTilly. TillyTilly shows up soon after Jess returns to England and it quickly becomes apparent that Jess is the only one who can see her. She plays mean tricks, breaks things, and graduates to doing serious harm to people around Jess.

This is one of those novels that disappoints because, despite some very good writing and an interesting story, it just never quite does what it sets out to do. The description says that it it draws from Nigerian mythology, but Oyeyemi makes few references to the myth and those that are there are pretty vague, so it just seems like a generic "evil imaginary friend" tale. All of the pieces of the story just never quite fits together in a satisfactory way.

Despite its defects, there are good points about The Icarus Girl. Oyeyemi has a beautiful style and her descriptions of the time spent with the extended family are wonderful. Also, she perfectly captures the playground rituals of a school: the clapping games, the scuffles, and the harassment of the loners by the popular.

While I won't be seeking out a copy of The Icarus Girl for my personal library, it was good enough to make me give the author another chance to impress me.

Wow...where to start? Probably by saying that there will be some spoilers, so caveat lector.

Last Days begins with Kline, a former undercover cop who recently had his hand cut off by a criminal, being engaged by a cult to investigate a crime that has been committed at their compound. The Brotherhood of Mutilation takes the biblical passage " if thy right hand offend thee, cut it off" literally and believe that the more amputations one has, the closer they are to God. They have chosen Kline for the job specifically because of his recent amputation. As Kline investigates, he discovers that the crime he has been tasked with solving hasn't been committed and that he is meant to be the fall guy.

After fighting his way out of the compound, Kline falls in with the Pauls, a splinter group of the Brotherhood who are all called Paul and think it's only necessary to amputate one's right hand to demonstrate devotion. The leader of the Pauls convinces Kline that he will only be safe from the Brotherhood if he kills them first, thus setting the stage for a finale that makes a Tarantino film look tame in comparison.

Evenson has created a strange, twisted, and utterly compelling story. Last Days is in many ways a critique of religions taken to extremes, and the lean prose gives the book a realistic feel that makes it all the more chilling. Ultimately, this is one of the most thought-provoking books I've ever read and it will continue to haunt--in a not unwelcome way--for a long time.

I picked up Amphigorey from the library on Saturday, and I'm hoping to squeeze it in this week.

>27 cbl_tn: I really liked Amphigorey and look forward to your thoughts on it.

I've been reading The Anatomy Murders and Welcome to Night Vale this week. Both enjoyable in totally different ways.

I just finished The Calling by Inger Ash Wolfe by Inger Ash Wolfe, and it was a chilling, spooky read. I can't wait to read the next in the Hazel Micallef series--The Taken by Hazel Micallef!

Happy Halloween reading to you all!

Karen O.

I usually do a lot of Halloween reading, but this year I didn't really manage much. I did listen to Neil Gaiman's The Ocean at the End of the Lane, which sort of fits; and I'm reading a book by Joe Hart called The River is Dark which promises some scares, but that's about it. I checked outPet Sematary but never got around to reading it, even with a renewal. Just not my year for Halloween reads.

I read three (four if you count Click Clack the Rattlebag, a short story by Neil Gaiman), only one of which novels I thought scary good. I am hoping to read one more (a YA, In the Shadow of Blackbirds by Cat Winters) before Saturday, but I'm being seduced by other books, so we'll see.

The three novels I read were, in order of purely subjective enjoyment:

The Lesser Dead by Christopher Buehlman ~ A dark, gritty, sometimes gory, and not at all pretty tale of vampires in NYC
Between Two Fires, also by Buehlman ~ Also gritty, gory, dark and not at all pretty historical tale of supernatural horror set in France during The Plague years
Harbor by John Ajvide Lindqvist ~ Nasty supernatural goings-on make life "interesting" on a small island off the coast of Sweden. Shades of Cthulhu!

I finished Amphigorey this afternoon. I think I waited too long to read this book. Black humor appealed to me in high school, when this book was popular among my peers. Now that I have a greater knowledge of the world and the horrible things that can happen to children, some of this book's content far exceeded my comfort threshold. I do love the gothic illustrations, though.