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.

This month starts with Kairos by Jenny Erpenbeck. Kairos is the winner of the International Booker Prize 2024. An intimate and devastating story of the path of two lovers through the ruins of a relationship, set against the backdrop of a seismic period in European history. Translated from German by Michael Hofmann.

Berlin. 11 July 1986. They meet by chance on a bus. She is a young student, he is older and married. Theirs is an intense and sudden attraction, fuelled by a shared passion for music and art, and heightened by the secrecy they must maintain. But when she strays for a single night he cannot forgive her and a dangerous crack forms between them, opening up a space for cruelty, punishment and the exertion of power. And the world around them is changing too: as the GDR begins to crumble, so too do all the old certainties and the old loyalties, ushering in a new era whose great gains also involve profound loss.

My first link is another novel translated from German, Perfume:the story of a murderer by Patrick Süskind, translated from German by John E Woods. It is an extraordinary novel, a Gothic work in the vein of Edgar Allen Poe, or Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Grey. It depicts the strange life of Jean-Baptiste Grenouille and is a book of smells. This is a horror story, one that made me not want to read it and yet also want to read it to the bitter end.

My second link is Tales of Mystery and Imagination by Edgar Allan Poe, which is a collection of Poe’s best stories containing all the terrifying and bewildering tales that characterise his work. As well as the Gothic horror of such famous stories as ‘The Pit and the Pendulum’, ‘The Fall of the House of Usher’, ‘The Premature Burial’ and ‘The Tell-Tale Heart’, all of Poe’s Auguste Dupin stories are included.

These are the first modern detective stories and include ‘The Murders in the Rue Morgue’, ‘The Mystery of Marie Roget’ and ‘The Purloined Letter’.

My third link stays on the theme of tales of horror with Tales of Terror by Robert Louis Stevenson, which are published in my copy of The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr Hyde. It consists of two short stories, both written for the Christmas “crawler” tradition in 1884 and 1885. Christmas was a season traditionally associated with supernatural and creepy tales. The Body Snatcher is very much a traditional Christmas ghost story, beginning with four men gathered in an inn on a dark winter’s night telling tales round the fireside of grisly deeds. The other story is Olalla, a Gothic tale, set in an ancient Spanish castle surrounded by deep woodland, about a young man recovering from his war wounds and to “renew his blood”, who finds himself living with a strange family.

My fourth link moves away from horror stories to crime fiction, linked by the word ‘tales’ in the title. It is Telling Tales by Ann Cleeves, a book I have read but I didn’t write a review. It’s the 2nd of her Vera Stanhope series in which the residents of an East Yorkshire village are revisited with the nightmare of a murder that happened 10 years before. There was some doubt about the guilty verdict passed on Jeanie Long and now it would seem that the killer is still at large. Inspector Vera Stanhope builds up a picture of a community afraid of itself and of outsiders.

My fifth link is On Beulah Height, Reginald Hill’s 17th Dalziel and Pascoe novel. It’s also set in a Yorkshire village, Dendale. Three little girls had gone missing from the village one summer. Their bodies were never found, and the best suspect, a strange lad named Benny Lightfoot, was held for a time, then released. Fifteen years later another little girl, Lorraine, aged seven went out for a walk one morning with her dog before her parents got up and didn’t return home, reviving memories of the missing children from fifteen years earlier.

My final link is to a another book featuring a character called Benny – The One I Was by Eliza Graham – historical fiction split between the present and the past following the lives of Benny Gault and Rosamund Hunter. Benny first came to Fairfleet in 1939, having fled Nazi Germany on a Kindertransport train. As an adult he bought the house and now he is dying of cancer. Rosamund returns to Fairfleet, her childhood home, to nurse Benny. I was totally engrossed in both their life stories as the various strands of the story eventually combined.

Half of my chain consists of horror stories, not a genre I often read and the other half is made up of crime fiction novels, as usual.

Next month (August 3, 2024), we’ll start with  The Museum of Modern Love by Heather Rose (Kate’s pick was inspired by Sue’s recent post about writers and artists).