Spooky Tales for Halloween

Halloween is almost upon us, the night when, traditionally, the dead are remembered. In modern times, it has taken on a less sombre meaning with trick or treating, apple-bobbing (do people still do that?) and spooky tales come to the fore. So, here are some books to get you into the ‘Halloween spirit’. Enter if you dare...

Dracula by Bram Stoker



What’s it about?

When Jonathan Harker visits Transylvania to help Count Dracula purchase a London house, he makes horrifying discoveries in his client's castle. Soon afterwards, disturbing incidents unfold in England: a ship runs aground on the shores of Whitby, its crew vanished; beautiful Lucy Westenra slowly succumbs to a mysterious, wasting illness, her blood drained away; and the lunatic Renfield raves about the imminent arrival of his 'master'. In the ensuing battle of wills between the sinister Count and a determined group of adversaries - led by the intrepid vampire hunter Abraham van Helsing - Bram Stoker created a masterpiece of the horror genre, probing into questions of identity, sanity and the dark corners of Victorian sexuality and desire.

Extract

Jonathan Harker’s Journal
(Kept in shorthand.)

3 May. Bistritz.1–Left Munich at 8:35 p. m., on 1st May, arriving at Vienna early next morning; should have arrived at 6:46, but train was an hour late. Buda-Pesth seems a wonderful place, from the glimpse which I got of it from the train and the little I could walk through the streets. I feared to go very far from the station, as we arrived late and would start as near the correct time as possible. The impression I had was that we were leaving the West and entering the East; the most western of splendid bridges over the Danube,2 which is here of noble width and depth, took us among the traditions of Turkish rule.
We left in pretty good time, and came after nightfall to Klausenburgh.3 Here I stopped for the night at the Hotel Royale. I had for dinner, or rather supper, a chicken done up some way with red pepper, which was very good but thirsty. (Mem., get recipe for Mina.) I asked the waiter, and he said it was called “paprika hendl,” and that, as it was a national dish, I should be able to get it anywhere along the Carpathians.4 I found my smattering of German very useful here; indeed, I don’t know how I should be able to get on without it.

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The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson



What’s it about?

Four seekers have arrived at the rambling old pile known as Hill House: Dr. Montague, an occult scholar looking for solid evidence of psychic phenomena; Theodora, his lovely assistant; Luke, the future inheritor of the estate; and Eleanor, a friendless, fragile young woman with a dark past. As they begin to cope with horrifying occurrences beyond their control or understanding, they cannot possibly know what lies ahead. For Hill House is gathering its powers - and soon it will choose one of them to make its own.

Extract

No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality; even larks and katydids are supposed, by some, to dream. Hill House, not sane, stood by itself against its hills, holding darkness within; it had stood so for eighty years and might stand for eighty more. Within, walls continued upright, bricks met neatly, floors were firm, and doors were sensibly shut; silence lay steadily against the wood and stone of Hill House, and whatever walked there, walked alone.

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The Woman In Black by Susan Hill



What’s it about?

Arthur Kipps, a junior solicitor, is summoned to attend the funeral Mrs Alice Drablow, the house's sole inhabitant of Eel Marsh House, unaware of the tragic secrets which lie hidden behind the shuttered windows. The house stands at the end of a causeway, wreathed in fog and mystery, but it is not until he glimpses a wasted young woman, dressed all in black, at the funeral, that a creeping sense of unease begins to take hold, a feeling deepened by the reluctance of the locals to talk of the woman in black - and her terrible purpose.

Extract

Christmas Eve

It was nine-thirty on Christmas Eve. As I crossed the long entrance hall of Monk’s Piece on my way
from the dining room, where we had just enjoyed the first of the happy, festive meals, towards the drawing room and the fire around which my family were now assembled, I paused and then, as I often do in the course of an evening, went to the front door, opened it and stepped outside.

I have always liked to take a breath of the evening, to smell the air, whether it is sweetly scented and balmy with the flowers of midsummer, pungent with the bonfires and leaf-mould of autumn, or crackling cold from frost and snow. I like to look about me at the sky above my head, whether there are moon and stars or utter blackness, and into the darkness ahead of me; I like to listen for the cries of nocturnal creatures and the moaning rise and fall of the wind, or the pattering of rain in the orchard trees, I enjoy the rush of air towards me up the hill from the flat pastures of the river valley.

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Rosemary's Baby by Ira Levin



What’s it about?

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 suspect that the Castavets' circle is not what it seems.

Extract

ROSEMARY AND GUY WOODHOUSE had signed a lease on a five-room apartment in a geometric white house on First Avenue when they received word, from a woman named Mrs. Cortez, that a four-room apartment in the Bramford had become available. The Bramford, old, black, and elephantine, is a warren of high-ceilinged apartments prized for their fireplaces and Victorian detail. Rosemary and Guy had been on its waiting list since their marriage but had finally given up.
Guy relayed the news to Rosemary, stopping the phone against his chest. Rosemary groaned “Oh no!” and looked as if she would weep.
“It’s too late,” Guy said to the phone. “We signed a lease yesterday.” Rosemary caught his arm. “Couldn’t we get out of it?” she asked him. “Tell them something?”
“Hold on a minute, will you, Mrs. Cortez?” Guy stopped the phone again. “Tell them what?” he asked.
Rosemary floundered and raised her hands helplessly. “I don’t know, the truth. That we have a chance to get into the Bramford.”
“Honey,” Guy said, “they’re not going to care about that.”
“You’ll think of something, Guy. Let’s just look, all right? Tell her we’ll look. Please. Before she hangs up.”
“We signed a lease, Ro; we’re stuck.”

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The Girl On The Landing by Paul Torday



What’s it about?

Elizabeth has been married to Michael for ten years. She has adjusted to a fairly monotonous routine with her wealthy, decent but boring husband. Part of this routine involves occasional visits to Beinn Caorrun, the dank and gloomy house in a Scottish glen that Michael inherited. There are memories there that Michael will not share with her.
But then Michael begins to change. It starts when he thinks he sees, in a picture, the figure of a girl on a landing. As he changes, life becomes so much more fun and Elizabeth sees glimpses of a man she can fall in love with at last. But who - or what - is changing Michael ...?

Extract

The last few miles of our journey took us through a region of fields of golden wheat, now being harvested as we drove past. The sky was golden too, ramparts of cumulus catching the late afternoon sun.

As we moved south the colours in the sky changed. Dark grey infused the clouds, and a corona of yellow light formed around their edges. A wind got up, bringing down a first handful of autumn leaves, and I could feel the vibration of distant thunder. That should not have been possible from inside a car, but I felt it all the same: a sense of huge charges of electricity building in the upper atmosphere, an intensity to the light where it gleamed between the darkening clouds. My perceptions had become so much sharper in the last few weeks; it was as if I was rediscovering the world.

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The Hundred-Year-Old Man Who Climbed Out of the Window and Disappeared

Title: The Hundred-Year-Old Man Who Climbed Out of the Window and Disappeared

Author: Jonas Jonasson

Number of pages: 400

What’s it about?

It all starts on the one-hundredth birthday of Allan Karlsson. Sitting quietly in his room in an old people's home, he is waiting for the party he-never-wanted-anyway to begin. The mayor is going to be there. The press is going to be there. But, as it turns out, Allan is not... Slowly but surely Allan climbs out of his bedroom window, into the flowerbed (in his slippers) and makes his getaway. And so begins his picaresque and unlikely journey involving criminals, several murders, a suitcase full of cash, and incompetent police. As his escapades unfold, we learn something of Allan's earlier life in which - remarkably - he helped to make the atom bomb, became friends with American presidents, Russian tyrants, and Chinese leaders, and was a participant behind the scenes in many key events of the twentieth century.

Opening words:

You might think he could have made up his mind earlier, and been man enough to inform his surroundings of his decision. But Allan Karlsson had never been given to pondering things too long.

So the idea had barely taken hold in the old man’s head before he opened the window of his room on the ground floor of the Old Folks’ Home in the town of Malmköping, and stepped out— into the flower bed

Read a longer extract here

What I thought:

This book – or at least the story - has been in the public eye a bit more of late because it has recently been made into a film. However, I am a great believer in reading the book before you see the film. You get to paint your own images in your mind - and books can often cover much more territory than a film can. And this book certainly covers a lot of territory. It’s a romp through 100 years of history, with a spritely centenarian who decides he will escape from a nursing home rather than attend his 100th birthday party.

We join Allan Karlsson on his journey both in the present (with a gangster’s money-filled suitcase) and in the past (as he accidentally stumbles his way into various major moments in history). I enjoyed this book, it was fun and, just about, credible, although by the end of the book it was perhaps pushing the bounds of believability. Think of it as a kind of Swedish Forrest Gump.

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Man Booker Prize 2014 Winner Announced

The winner of the Man Booker Prize 2014 has just been announced and the winner is…

The Narrow Road to the Deep North by Richard Flanagan

August, 1943. In the despair of a Japanese POW camp on the Thai-Burma Death Railway, Australian surgeon Dorrigo Evans is haunted by his affair with his uncle’s young wife two years earlier. His life is a daily struggle to save the men under his command from starvation, from cholera, from pitiless beatings. Until he receives a letter that will change him forever.

Moving deftly from the POW camp to contemporary Australia, from the experiences of Dorrigo and his comrades to those of the Japanese guards, this savagely beautiful novel tells a story of love, death, and family, exploring the many forms of good and evil, war and truth, guilt and transcendence, as one man comes of age, prospers, only to discover all that he has lost.

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The other books on the shortlist were:

To Rise Again at a Decent Hour by Joshua Ferris

There's nothing like a dental chair to remind a man that he's alone in the world . . .

Paul O'Rourke - dentist extraordinaire, reluctant New Yorker, avowed atheist, disaffected Red Sox fan, and a connoisseur of the afternoon mochaccino - is a man out of touch with modern life. While his dental practice occupies his days, his nights are filled with darker thoughts, as he alternately marvels at and rails against the optimism of the rest of humanity.

So it goes, until someone begins to impersonate Paul online. What began as an outrageous violation of privacy soon becomes something far more soul-frightening: the possibility that the virtual 'Paul' might be a better version of the man in the flesh . . .

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We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves by Karen Jay Fowler

Rosemary's young, just at college, and she's decided not to tell anyone a thing about her family. So we're not going to tell you too much either: you'll have to find out for yourselves, round about page 77, what it is that makes her unhappy family unlike any other.

Rosemary is now an only child, but she used to have a sister the same age as her, and an older brother. Both are now gone - vanished from her life. There's something unique about Rosemary's sister, Fern. And it was this decision, made by her parents, to give Rosemary a sister like no other, that began all of Rosemary's trouble. So now she's telling her story: full of hilarious asides and brilliantly spiky lines, it's a looping narrative that begins towards the end, and then goes back to the beginning. Twice.

It's funny, clever, intimate, honest, analytical and swirling with ideas that will come back to bite you. We hope you enjoy it, and if, when you're telling a friend about it, you do decide to spill the beans about Fern - it's pretty hard to resist - don't worry. One of the few studies Rosemary doesn't quote says that spoilers actually enhance reading.

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J: A Novel by Howard Jacobson

Set in the future - a world where the past is a dangerous country, not to be talked about or visited - J is a love story of incomparable strangeness, both tender and terrifying.

Two people fall in love, not yet knowing where they have come from or where they are going.

Kevern doesn’t know why his father always drew two fingers across his lips when he said a word starting with a J. It wasn’t then, and isn’t now, the time or place to be asking questions. Ailinn too has grown up in the dark about who she was or where she came from. On their first date Kevern kisses the bruises under her eyes. He doesn’t ask who hurt her. Brutality has grown commonplace. They aren’t sure if they have fallen in love of their own accord, or whether they’ve been pushed into each other’s arms. But who would have pushed them, and why?

Hanging over the lives of all the characters in this novel is a momentous catastrophe – a past event shrouded in suspicion, denial and apology, now referred to as What Happened, If It Happened.

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The Lives of Others by Neel Mukherjee

‘Ma, I feel exhausted with consuming, with taking and grabbing and using. I am so bloated that I feel I cannot breathe any more. I am leaving to find some air, some place where I shall be able to purge myself, push back against the life given me and make my own. I feel I live in a borrowed house. It’s time to find my own… Forgive me…’

Calcutta, 1967. Unnoticed by his family, Supratik has become dangerously involved in extremist political activism. Compelled by an idealistic desire to change his life and the world around him, all he leaves behind before disappearing is this note …

The ageing patriarch and matriarch of his family, the Ghoshes, preside over their large household, unaware that beneath the barely ruffled surface of their lives the sands are shifting. More than poisonous rivalries among sisters-in-law, destructive secrets, and the implosion of the family business, this is a family unravelling as the society around it fractures. For this is a moment of turbulence, of inevitable and unstoppable change: the chasm between the generations, and between those who have and those who have not, has never been wider.

Ambitious, rich and compassionate The Lives of Others anatomises the soul of a nation as it unfolds a family history. A novel about many things, including the limits of empathy and the nature of political action, it asks: how do we imagine our place amongst others in the world? Can that be reimagined? And at what cost? This is a novel of unflinching power and emotional force.

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How to be both by Ali Smith

How to be Bothis a novel all about art's versatility. Borrowing from painting's fresco technique to make an original literary double-take, it's a fast-moving genre-bending conversation between forms, times, truths and fictions. There's a renaissance artist of the 1460s. There's the child of a child of the 1960s.Two tales of love and injustice twist into a singular yarn where time gets timeless, structural gets playful, knowing gets mysterious, fictional gets real - and all life's givens get given a second chance. Please Note: This book has a dual structure and can be read in two ways. There are two stories in the book and they can be read in either order.

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Five Books for Black History Month

October is Black History Month in the UK (it is in February in the US and Canada), so I am going to suggest some books to read. Most suggested reading for Black History Month seems to be non-fiction. Whilst I do read non-fiction, I have a definite preference for fiction, so I am going to suggest primarily fiction books – although they are often inspired by real events.

Go Tell it on the Mountain by James Baldwin



What’s it about?

With lyrical precision, psychological directness, resonating symbolic power, and a rage that is at once unrelenting and compassionate, Baldwin chronicles a fourteen-year-old boy’s discovery of the terms of his identity as the stepson of the minister of a storefront Pentecostal church in Harlem one Saturday in March of 1935. Baldwin’s rendering of his protagonist’s spiritual, sexual, and moral struggle of self-invention opened new possibilities in the American language and in the way Americans understand themselves.

Excerpt

I looked down the line,
And I wondered.

Everyone had always said that john would be a preacher when he grew up, just like his father. It had been said so often that John, without ever thinking about it, had come to believe it himself. Not until the morning of his fourteenth birthday did he really begin to think about it, and by then it was already too late.

His earliest memories—which were in a way, his only memories—were of the hurry and brightness of Sunday mornings. They all rose together on that day; his father, who did not have to go to work, and led them in prayer before breakfast; his mother, who dressed up on that day, and looked almost young, with her hair straightened, and on her head the close-fitting white cap that was the uniform of holy women; his younger brother, Roy, who was silent that day because his father was home. Sarah, who wore a red ribbon in her hair that day, and was fondled by her father. And the baby, Ruth, who was dressed in pink and white, and rode in her mother's arms to church.

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A Lesson Before Dying by Ernest J Gaines



What’s it about?

In a small Cajun community in 1940s Louisiana, a young black man is about to go to the electric chair for murder. A white shopkeeper had died during a robbery gone wrong; though the young man on trial had not been armed and had not pulled the trigger, in that time and place, there could be no doubt of the verdict or the penalty.

Excerpt

I was not there, yet I was there. No, I did not go to the trial, I did not hear the verdict, because I knew all the time what it would be. Still, I was there. I was there as much as anyone else was there. Either I sat behind my aunt and his godmother or I sat beside them. Both are large women, but his godmother is larger. She is of average height, five four, five five, but weighs nearly two hundred pounds. Once she and my aunt had found their places--two rows behind the table where he sat with his court-appointed attorney--his godmother became as immobile as a great stone or as one of our oak or cypress stumps. She never got up once to get water or go to the bathroom down in the basement. She just sat there staring at the boy's clean-cropped head where he sat at the front table with his lawyer. Even after he had gone to await the jurors' verdict, her eyes remained in that one direction. She heard nothing said in the courtroom. Not by the prosecutor, not by the defense attorney, not by my aunt. (Oh, yes, she did hear one word--one word, for sure: "hog.") It was my aunt whose eyes followed the prosecutor as he moved from one side of the courtroom to the other, pounding his fist into the palm of his hand, pounding the table where his papers lay, pounding the rail that separated the jurors from the rest of the courtroom. It was my aunt who followed his every move, not his godmother. She was not even listening. She had gotten tired of listening, She knew, as we all knew, what the outcome would be. A white man had been killed during a robbery, and though two of the robbers had been killed on the spot, one had been captured, and he, too, would have to die. Though he told them no, he had nothing to do with it, that he was on his way to the White Rabbit Bar and Lounge when Brother and Bear drove up beside him and offered him a ride. After he got into the car, they asked him if he had any money. When he told them he didn't have a solitary dime, it was then that Brother and Bear started talking credit, saying that old Gropé should not mind crediting them a pint since he knew them well, and he knew that the grinding season was coming soon, and they would be able to pay him back then.

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Strange Fruit: Billie Holiday, Café Society And An Early Cry For Civil Rights by David Margolick



What’s it about?

The story of the song that foretold a movement and the Lady who dared sing it. Billie Holiday's signature tune, 'Strange Fruit', with its graphic and heart-wrenching portrayal of a lynching in the South, brought home the evils of racism as well as being an inspiring mark of resistance. The song's powerful, evocative lyrics - written by a Jewish communist schoolteacher - portray the lynching of a black man in the South. In 1939, its performance sparked controversy (and sometimes violence) wherever Billie Holiday went. Not until sixteen years later did Rosa Parks refuse to yield her seat on a Montgomery, Alabama bus. Yet 'Strange Fruit' lived on, and Margolick chronicles its effect on those who experienced it first-hand: musicians, artists, journalists, intellectuals, students, budding activists, even the waitresses and bartenders who worked the clubs.

Incidentally, you can hear a really interesting radio programme on the song Strange Fruit here

Excerpt

As Billie Holiday later told the story, a single gesture by a patron at a New York nightclub called Café Society changed the history of American music that night in early 1939, the night that she first sang "Strange Fruit."

Café Society was New York's only truly integrated nightclub, a place catering to progressive types with open minds. But Holiday was to recall that even there, she was afraid to sing this new song, a song that tackled racial hatred head-on at a time when protest music was all but unknown, and regretted it—at least momentarily—when she first did. "There wasn't even a patter of applause when I finished," she later wrote in her autobiography. "Then a lone person began to clap nervously. Then suddenly everybody was clapping."

The applause grew louder and a bit less tentative as "Strange Fruit" became a nightly ritual for Holiday, then one of her most successful records, then one of her signature songs, at least in those places where it was safe to perform. For throughout Holiday's short life—she died in 1939 at the age of forty-four—the song existed in a kind of artistic quarantine: it could travel, but only to selected places. And in the forty years since her death, audiences have continued to applaud, respect, and be moved by this disturbing ballad, unique in Holiday's oeuvre and in the repertoire of American music, as it has left its mark on generations of writers, musicians, and other listeners, both black and white, in America and throughout the world.

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Red River by Lalita Tademy



What’s it about?

A heartbreaking and compelling story of a family's experiences of slavery and the American Civil War.

From Sam Tademy, the son of a runaway slave, and his fiercely strong wife Polly, to the father and son who witness unspeakable crimes, this is a story in which courage and hope do battle with almost unendurable suffering; where real lives collide with history.

Excerpt

Come closer. This is not a story to go down easy, and the backwash still got hold of us today. The history of a family. The history of a country. From bondage to the joy of freedom, and almost ten hopeful years drinking up the promise of Reconstruction, and then back into the darkness, so fearsome don’t nobody want to talk about the scary time. Don’t nobody want to remember even now, decades removed, now things better some. Why stir up all that old mess from way back in 1873? I don’t hold with that point of view. I was there, watching, like all the women done, up close some of the time but mostways from a distance. They all dead and buried now. I outlast each one, using up my time on earth and some of theirs too. One hundred last birthday, trapped in this wasted body. All I do now is remember and pray the story don’t get lost forever. It woulda suit Lucy fine, everybody forgetting. Lucy and me, that the only thing we usta argue about, when we was both clear-minded and had more juice to work up, but those talks never last too long. She just shut her mouth and shut her mind, refusing the truth. I still got heat around the subject, but where to put it now? Lucy gone last year. She turn one hundred five before she left this earth. Was two of us held on for such a long time, me and Lucy. Outlasting our men—our husbands, our sons, even some grandsons. We all had it hard, but the men, they had it worse, ‘specially those what come up on life from the front. Women is the long-livers at the base of the Tademy family tree.

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Soul Kiss by Shay Youngblood



What’s it about?

Soul Kiss is a coming of age novel about an African American girl, Mariah Kin Santos, who explores issues of identity, the fluid nature of sexuality, community as family and the boundaries of familial love. Until she was seven, Mariah Santos lived with her mother, and she might as well have been in heaven. Mama was love and warmth, kisses and games, long evenings of hot-plate food and blues on the radio. And Mama told Mariah stories of her father – his eyes were so black they nearly hypnotized her, she said. Now he was in Mexico, she said, painting the sky blue. But one day, out of that same blue sky, Mama decided to bring Mariah down to Georgia on the bus, to visit Aunt Faith and Aunt Merleen, who seemed so fierce and forbidding, so unlike Mama. And then Mama walked away, leaving behind a suitcase, a good-bye letter, and a little girl who would learn, through the unveiling of secrets and the slow journey to self-acceptance, to look elsewhere for the love she had lost. This stunning debut novel by Shay Youngblood is, ultimately, a love story – an unusual and unforgettable tale of the love that flows from within, that sustains us in times of trouble…that suffuses us, body and soul.

Excerpt

The first evening Mama doesn’t come back, I make a sandwich with leaves from her good-bye letter. I want to eat her words. I stare at the message written on the stiff yellowed paper as if the shaky scrawl would stand up and speak to me. Mama loves you. Wait here for me. I want her to take back the part about waiting. After crushing the paper into two small balls I flatten them with my fist, then stuff them in the envelope my Aunt Faith gave me after Mama had gone. I feel weak as water and stone cold as I sit with my legs dangling over the edge of the think mattress on the high iron-frame bed, reading by the dim lamplight. I unfold the tiger-print scarf Mama gave me and lay in its center the goodbye sandwich, a small book of rhymes, a biscuit from dinner wrapped in wax paper, and he pink radio that fits in the palm of my hand. I tie the end of the scarf twice across the body of my treasures and hold it to my heart. I turn off the light by the bed and make my way across the bedroom in the dark.

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A Killing in the Hills

Title: A Killing in the Hills

Author: Julia Keller

Number of pages: 384

Opening words:

She didn’t come here often, because there was nothing left.

When she did come, it tended to be at dusk, and she would stand and look at the bare spot, at the place where the trailer had been. It was only a few dozen yards away from Comer Creek.

Above is the beginning of the Prologue, read chapter 1 here.

What's it about?

Nestled in the foothills of the Appalachian Mountains, visitors see only its stunning natural beauty. But for those living there it's a different story. The mountain roads harbour secret places, perfect for making the prescription drugs that tempt its desperately poor. Bell Elkins left a broken teenager, savaged by a past she couldn't forget. But, as prosecuting attorney for Raythune County, Bell is back and determined to help clean up the only home she has ever known. As winter sets in and her daughter is witness to a shocking triple murder, Bell finds her family in danger. Can she uncover the truth before her world is destroyed again?

What I thought:

This book is the first in the Bell Elkins series of novels by Pulitzer winning Journalist Julia Keller. Right from the very first page, it was apparent that Julia Keller really could write.

That said, I think this was a book of two halves. The first half, whilst starting with a very brutal crime was about character formation and scene setting, with the crime story interweaved. I really enjoyed that style. I enjoyed each page and it was always a pleasure to pick the book up again and continue reading. The second half of the book was more crime driven and perhaps more of a traditional crime novel. On balance, I probably preferred the first half of the book, but it was all very readable and well written. My only criticism of the book is that I am not sure I found the final resolution totally credible. However, I won't comment further for fear of giving the ending away.

I must track down the next in the series.

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