Top 5:books to recommend for Halloween

Published on October 29, 2024 by Margaret3 Comments

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Top 5 Tuesday was created by Shanah at Bionic Book Worm, and it is now being hosted by Meeghan at Meeghan Reads. For details of all of the latest prompts for October to December, see Meeghan’s post here.

It’s time to talk about Top 5 books to recommend for Halloween. It’s trick or treat time — are you going to tell us your best scary books or cutesy Halloween tales?

I’m a reluctant reader of scary stories but these are five I have read and enjoyed:

The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, a suspense story of a young woman slowly but surely losing her mind – or is it a case of a woman suffering from post-natal depression most cruelly treated by her doctor husband? The un-named woman has just had a baby, which she is unable to bear to be near her. She spends most of her time in an attic bedroom, with barred windows and a bed fixed to the floor. The walls are covered in a hideous yellow wallpaper which has been torn off in places. It’s not a beautiful yellow like buttercups but it makes her think of old, foul bad yellow things – and it smells. The pattern is tortuous and she sees a woman trapped behind the wallpaper as though behind bars, crawling and shaking the pattern attempting to escape. Definitely a creepy and disturbing story! By the end I began to question just what was real and what was imagination – it’s psychologically scary!

The Brimstone Wedding by Barbara Vine, a horrifying mystery. I think it is one of the best of Barbara Vine’s books that I’ve read – nearly as good as A Dark-Adapted Eye and writing under her real name, Ruth Rendell, A Judgement in Stone. Jenny Warner is a carer at a retirement home, Middleton Hall where she meets Stella Newland, who is dying of lung cancer. At first Stella never mentions her husband or her past life, but gradually she confides in Jenny, telling her things she has never said to her son and daughter – things about her life she doesn’t want them to know. The subtle horror of what I was reading gripped me. It is indeed a ‘chilling’ book.

Broken Voices by Andrew Taylor, a ghost story set in an East Anglian cathedral city just before the First World War when two schoolboys are left at the cathedral school during the Christmas holidays. They lodge with Mr Ratcliffe, a semi-retired schoolmaster, a bachelor now in his seventies who lived with Mordred, his malevolent cat, in a grace-and-favour house granted to him by the Dean and chapter of the cathedral. An ancient tragedy is connected with the cathedral and the bell tower – the cathedral is full of shifting shadows, and the bell tower is haunted by fragments of melody, which one of the boys can hear. The story has a creepy atmosphere and a tension as the boys investigate the tower in the dead of night. It’s suitably ambiguous. It’s not spelled out and you can make your own decision – was there a ghost and was there a murder.

Dark Matter by Michelle Paver, a ghost story in the form of a diary – that of Jack Miller who in 1937 was part of an expedition to the High Arctic to study its biology, geology and ice dynamics and to carry out a meteorological survey. As the darkness descends, Jack is left alone at the camp and his nightmare really begins. Jack describes the ‘dark matter‘ of the title, as that part of the universe that cannot be seen or detected, but is there. It’s a chilling book, very chilling, both in the setting in the High Arctic and in atmosphere. And it is very scary!

Joyland, by Stephen King, a ghost story, a love story, a story of loss and heartbreak, set in a funfair. It’s also a murder mystery and utterly compelling to read. It’s narrated by Devin Jones, looking back forty years to the time he was a student, suffering from a broken heart, as his girlfriend had just rejected him and he spent a summer working at Joyland, in North Carolina, an amusement park with ‘a little of the old-time carny flavor‘. The Horror House, is a ‘spook’ house which is said to be haunted by the ghost of Linda Gray, whose boyfriend cut her throat in the Horror House. The boyfriend had not been found and it appears he may be a serial killer as there had been four other similar murders in Georgia and the Carolinas.

It’s also a story of friendship, of Tom and Erin, of children with the ‘sight’, a young boy in a wheelchair and his mother, and Dev’s search for the killer. I loved it! King tells his tale, with just a touch of horror and the supernatural.

The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson

Published on October 28, 2020 by Margaret5 Comments

I read The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson at the end of September and it is one of the books that’s in my ‘to be reviewed pile’, which is getting far too big, as I keep reading book after book without writing about them!

About the book:

It is the story of four seekers who arrive at a notoriously unfriendly pile called Hill House: Dr. Montague, an occult scholar looking for solid evidence of a “haunting”; Theodora, the lighthearted assistant; Eleanor, a friendless, fragile young woman well acquainted with poltergeists; and Luke, the future heir of Hill House. At first, their stay seems destined to be merely a spooky encounter with inexplicable phenomena. But Hill House is gathering its powers—and soon it will choose one of them to make its own. (Goodreads)

This is a horror story, but thank goodness there is no gore. Instead it is macabre and has a chilling atmosphere. It’s more of a psychological study than a horror story and as such I don’t think it’s as good or as terrifying as her later book, We Have Always Lived in the Castle.

Dr. Montague, a doctor of philosophy with a keen interest in the supernatural and psychic manifestations had been looking for a ‘haunted’ house to investigate all his life. So, when he heard the stories about the strange goings on at Hill House he decided he would spend three months living there and see what happened, and he set about finding other people to stay there with him.

Eleanor is the main character in the book, next to the House itself, and what happens is told from Eleanor’s point of view. As a child Eleanor had once seemed to activate a poltergeist, although she doesn’t remember that. As an adult she had spent eleven years looking after her invalid mother and it had left her a lonely, embittered spinster of thirty two. After her mother died she sees Dr. Montague’s invitation to spend the summer at Hill House as something she had been waiting for all her life, an opportunity to change her life. Theodora is not at all like Eleanor – her ‘world was one of delight and soft colors’ and after arguing with her friend with whom she shared an apartment, she accepted Dr. Montague’s invitation too. The third person to accept was Luke, the nephew of the owner of Hill House, who would one day inherit the House. He was a liar and also a thief.

These four people arrived at Hill House where they were met by the Dudleys – Mr Dudley, the surly caretaker and his dour wife, the housekeeper. Neither of them live in the house but having told the guests which rooms they were to sleep in, and the arrangements for meals, they leave them alone at night. They leave before it gets dark.

Eleanor realises she should have turned back at the gate and a voice inside her tells her to ‘get away from here, get away.’ There are stories about the tragedies connected with the house, scandal, madness and a suicide – when a girl hanged herself from the turret in the tower. Dr Montague believes

the evil is in the house itself and that it has enchained and destroyed its people and their lives, it is a place of contained ill will.

Strange things happen, doors open themselves, the walls and floors are at odd angles, the rooms all connect so Eleanor and the others lose their sense of direction and get lost, the rooms they want to find eluding them. There are places where there are ‘cold spots’, and strange noises scare them at night. The tone shifts from the bright sunlight outside to the chill and foreboding of the house. Nothing is what it first appears to be and as I read on I felt I was sinking into the story in an unpleasant way – Eleanor becomes increasingly unstable and I began to realise that she is an unreliable narrator. The story took several ambiguous turns, so that I was not quite sure what was really happening. Was the house really haunted or was it all an effect of what was going on in their minds, or was it all just in Eleanor’s fevered imagination?

The book is well written, full of confusion and misdirection. There are moments of pure fear, a sense of excitement, friendship and even humour with the arrival of Dr Montague’s wife and her pompous friend Arthur Parker, and their ridiculous efforts with a ‘planchette’, a device similar to a Ouija Board. I thought was an odd interlude in the story, and not really necessary. The best parts are, I think, the descriptions of Hill House – the dark horror at the centre of the story.

No human eye can isolate the unhappy coincidence of line and place which suggests evil in the face of a house, and yet somehow a manic juxtaposition, a badly turned angle, some chance meeting of roof and sky turned Hill House into a place of despair, more frightening because the face of Hill House seemed awake, with a watchfulness from the blank windows and a touch of glee in the eyebrow of a cornice. …
It was a house without kindness, never meant to be lived in, not a fir place for people or for love or for hope. Exorcism cannot alter the countenance of a house; Hill House would stay as it was until it was destroyed. (pages 34 – 35)

Thin Air by Michelle Paver

Published on October 12, 2020 by Margaret4 Comments

I read Thin Air: A Ghost Story by Michelle Paver in the summer, but it’s a good choice to read for Halloween. I didn’t find it as scary as Dark Matter, but even so it is very atmospheric and chilling – in more ways than one. The setting is Kangchenjunga in the Himalayas as a group of five men set out to climb the mountain in 1935.

Kanchenjunga, the third highest mountain in the world, had claimed many lives and no one had reached the summit. Held to be a sacred mountain, it is one of the most dangerous mountains in the world – believed to be the haunt of demons and evil spirits. An unsuccessful attempt had been made in 1907, led by Edmund Lyell, when only two men had returned. The group in 1935, led by Major Cotterell, attempted to follow the 1907 route up the south-west face.

Their story is narrated by medic, Dr. Stephen Pearce, accompanying his older brother, Kits. The brothers have always been rivals and this continues as they make their way up the mountain. Things start to go wrong almost straight away and Stephen is full of foreboding. He fears someone is following them and when he finds a rucksack left behind by the earlier climbers he fears he is loosing his mind. Under the most extreme weather conditions, the constant fear of an avalanche and the increasing effects of mountain sickness Stephen’s paranoia rises. More horrors keep piling on.

It’s not a long book, 240 pages, and almost half of it describes the mountain itself and the route the climbers took to get to the start of the climb and setting up their base camp. So it is only in the later part where the terror hinted at before sets in. The isolation, a sense of ‘otherness’, the extreme cold and the immense scale of the mountain with its towering pinnacles, deep crevasses, and above all the silence dominates. Were Stephen’s experiences the result of being at a high altitude, were they hallucinations – or was what he saw really there? I was never sure and that was part of the horror.

Thin Air is based on real events, although the 1907 and 1935 expeditions described in it are fictional. But the setting is real, the characterisation is excellent as is the feel of the 1930s, with its class snobbery, and racism and above all the creeping sense of dread that pervades the whole book.

Six Degrees of Separation from The Turn of the Screw to A Jealous Ghost

Published on October 3, 2020 by Margaret12 Comments

It’s time again for Six Degrees of Separation, a monthly link-up hosted by Kate at Books Are My Favourite and Best. Each month a book is chosen as a starting point and linked to six other books to form a chain. A book doesn’t need to be connected to all the other books on the list, only to the one next to it in the chain.

The chain this month begins with a book I’ve read, The Turn of the Screw by Henry James. But is it a ghost story or a psychological study? Either way there are creepy, disturbing things going on. It’s a story within a story, told as a ghost story to a group of people as they sit gathered round a fire in an old house. It tells of two children and their governess. She has been employed by their uncle who wants nothing to do with them. Their previous governess had died under mysterious circumstances (was it in childbirth?).

There’s a very different kind of ghost in Robert Harris’s book, The Ghost – a ghostwriter, employed to finish writing the memoirs of recently retired prime minister of Great Britain, Adam Peter Benet Lang. The ghostwriter soon discovers that Lang has secrets in his past that are returning to haunt him – secrets with the power to kill.

There’s also a different kind of ghost in Mortmain Hall by Martin Edwards, which begins, ‘The ghost climbed out of a hackney carriage‘. Rachel followed the ghost as he entered a funeral train run by the London Necropolis Company for privileged first-class passengers. Set in 1930 this is a complex murder mystery with several plot lines.

There’s a ‘real’ ghost in Rivers of London by Ben Aaronovitch – Nicholas Wallpenny, who has been dead for at least a hundred and twenty years – he is a ghost. This is an urban fantasy set in the real world of London, a mix of reality and the supernatural.

There’s ghost in a stained glass window in The Glass Guardian by Linda Gillard. Ruth has inherited a dilapidated Victorian house on the Isle of Skye: Tigh na Linne, the summer home she shared as a child with her beloved Aunt Janet. As she attempts to sort through her aunt’s belongings it becomes clear that there is more about her aunt and her family history than she ever knew before. And then she realises there is someone else in the house and there is a stained glass window behind a large wardrobe, which she never knew existed. From there on Ruth is unsure whether she is in her ‘Sane Mind’ or her ‘Insane Mind’, as she hears the wardrobe being dragged from its position in the dead of night.

Next, a ghost in a cathedral in Broken Voices by Andrew Taylor, set in an East Anglian cathedral city just before the First World War when two schoolboys are left at the cathedral school during the Christmas holidays. They lodge with Mr Ratcliffe, a semi-retired schoolmaster, a bachelor now in his seventies. The two boys are entertained by the ghost stories that Mr Ratcliffe tells them. There was an ancient tragedy connected with the cathedral bells, the tower and a Canon who had been commissioned to write an anthem to mark the occasion when the bells were recast. The cathedral is full of shifting shadows, and the bell tower is haunted by fragments of melody, which one of the boys can hear.

A N Wilson’s book, The Jealous Ghost, brings us back full circle in the chain, because it’s a re-writing of The Turn of the Screw. Sallie Declan is a young American in London, obsessed with Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw, the subject of her PhD. thesis. She leaves her studies for a temporary job as a nanny in a large country house and builds a fantasy about her emotional future there. Surely she can see it is all delusion? But a progressively darker reality unfolds leading inevitably to a terrible and shocking climax. I enjoyed this book, but prefer the original.

~~~

My six degrees are full of ghosts of different types, some literal, some literary, some in a supernatural sense and some psychological. From spooky and creepy to loving and urban fantasy fun. All of them haunting tales in one sense or another.

My Friday Post: The Ghost of Lily Painter by Caitlin Davies

Published on February 21, 2020February 19, 2020 by Margaret8 Comments

Every Friday Book Beginnings on Friday is hosted by Gillion at Rose City Reader where you can share the first sentence (or so) of the book you are reading, along with your initial thoughts about the sentence, impressions of the book, or anything else the opener inspires.

The Ghost of Lily Painter is by Caitlin Davies and I want to read it because it looks good, a blend of fact and fiction based on true events. I also want to read it as I’ve recently read Happy Old Me by Hunter Davies and he mentions in it that his daughter, Caitlin, is an author (like his wife Margaret Forster), with ten books published. I love Margaret Forster’s books, so I thought I’d see what her daughter’s books are like.

The Ghost of Lily Painter

It is a bitter winter’s evening and the little girl is in her bedroom standing confidently before her mirror. The mirror is affixed to the wall at such a height that she has to tiptoe herself up to see her body entirely, but then, how dramatically she tilts her head. How regally she nods at her reflection as she pulls at the wispy black feathers of the wrap that hangs loosely around her shoulders.

Also every Friday there is The Friday 56, hosted by Freda at Freda’s Voice.

30879-friday2b56 These are the rules:

Grab a book, any book.
Turn to page 56, or 56% on your eReader. If you have to improvise, that is okay.
Find any sentence (or a few, just don’t spoil it) that grabs you.
Post it.
Add the URL to your post in the link on Freda’s most recent Friday 56 post.

Page 56:

I didn’t know she still had this lizard. Ben gave it to her from the inside of his Christmas cracker last year. It’s a tiny cheap thing, green and yellow with a rubbery stickiness, but she’s kept it all this time and here she is talking to it like it’s precious. She won’t talk to me about her day, but she will tell a little green lizard.

Blurb

The first time Annie Sweet sees 43 Stanley Road, the house is so perfect she almost feels as though it has chosen her. But with her husband seeming more distant, and her daughter wrapped up in her friends and new school, Annie is increasingly left alone to mull over the past.

She soon becomes consumed by the house and everyone who has lived there before her, especially a young music hall singer called Lily Painter, whose sparkling performances were the talk of London. As Annie delves further into the past she unravels the case of two notorious baby farmers, who cruelly preyed on vulnerable unmarried mothers. And until she solves the mystery at the heart of the scandal, the ghost of Lily Painter will never be able to rest.

Basing her story on true events, Caitlin Davies skilfully blends fact and fiction to bring to life part of our sinister past. Spanning an entire century, from the journals of an Edwardian police inspector to a doomed wartime love affair, The Ghost of Lily Painter is a gripping and poignant novel.

~~~

Have you read this book? What did you think?

My Friday Post: The Greatcoat by Helen Dunmore

Published on November 8, 2019November 7, 2019 by Margaret7 Comments

Greatcoat

The library van visit was on Tuesday this week and The Greatcoat by Helen Dunmore caught my eye because ever since I read her last book, Birdcage Walk I have been wanting to read more of her books.

The description on the back cover:

It is the winter of 1952, and Isabel Carey is struggling to adjust to the realities of married life in Yorkshire.

Isolated and lonely, she is also intensely cold. And her husband – a doctor – is rarely at home. And then one night, she discovers an old RAF greatcoat in the back of a cupboard. She puts it on for warmth – and is startled by a knock at her window.

Outside is a young man. A pilot. And he wants to come in …

Chapter One

1952

Isabel sat back on her heels and watched flames spring up in the grate. They were pale and there was no heat in them. She was cold, she was tired, her back ached and her eyes stung – from the smoke of course. But at least the fire was lit.

Also every Friday there is The Friday 56, hosted by Freda at Freda’s Voice.

30879-friday2b56 These are the rules:

Grab a book, any book.
Turn to page 56, or 56% on your eReader. If you have to improvise, that is okay.
Find any sentence (or a few, just don’t spoil it) that grabs you.
Post it.
Add the URL to your post in the link on Freda’s most recent Friday 56 post.

Pages 55-56:

There was a man outside the window. She saw the pallor of his face first, as it seemed to bob against the glass, too high up to belong to a man who had his feet on the ground.

I want to know more – do you too?