That’s my working title for a manuscript I am writing about an elderly witch looking back on her life and her youthful spiritual struggles over whether to use her arts to further good or evil. A friendly talking aardvark advises her that there is a third way that straddles the limbo world in between. With the aardvark’s encouragement, she leaves her family to enter boarding school at The Young Witches Institute where she majors in Lesser Evil. Upon graduation she must decide whether to rejoin her coven or become a political strategist.
Okay, I’m kidding. But, you didn’t seriously think that I would be able to overcome the urge to write a Halloween dairy did you?
I’ve always had an attraction to the School of Scary Writing, but I keep a careful watch on myself not to overindulge and to be aware of the fact that I am a suggestible sort. I think that I may be more receptive than many to the blandishments of alternate dimensions and parallel universes and time warps and other forms of being inhabiting my plane with me. And yes, I have had a couple of eerie things happen to me.
If you want to be scared by words on a page, you have to do it right and set the scene. Preferably, you should be alone and it should be night and it would be terrific if there had been a storm that killed the electricity and you were reading by the light of a sputtering candle and if the house you were in happened to be old and creaky and feature a dyspeptic housekeeper who issued dark warnings about making sure your door was locked and if your faithful dog got all cringey and whiny all of a sudden for no reason. I know that’s a lot, but just do the best you can. Most of the time, many of us have to settle for the bare minimum of its simply being nighttime and reading in bed.
I can almost feel the atmosphere around me change and become denser and heavier when I’m reading something creepy late at night. The stillness becomes charged and my heartbeat increases. Then I get the sinking feeling of “Now, I've done it. Now I've let them in!"
Following is my list of Scary Stories I Might Have Been Better Off Not Reading:
In my opinion, the entire ghost, haunting, horror genre is dealt with most successfully in short fiction. The Victorians and Edwardians were particularly fascinated with the topic which co-incided with a huge rise in popularity of spiritualism, seances, Ouija boards and the like. Some large part of the fascination must have stemmed from the high mortality rates of the day and the desperate desires of those left behind to communicate with their loved ones in the great beyond.
You can't go wrong with a collection of short writings from this master of the genreThe Collected Ghost Stories of EF Benson. EF Benson is one of my favorite writers; I chose his Mapp and Lucia Books as the topic of my very first Books In My Life diary.
EF Benson would be on my list of guests for The Ultimate Dinner Party. I would love the meet this author who mastered both horror and humor - I have laughed until I've cried reading him and I've also been reduced to a fearful, quivering mass huddling under my covers reading him.
I also recommend The Oxford Book of Victorian Ghost Stories.
Now, onto some other favorites in a longer format:
The House on the Borderland by William Hope Hodgson. I never heard of this book published in 1908 before I stumbled upon it myself in a click fest on Amazon but all I can say is that it is an amazing book and deserves to be far, far better known than it is. Primarily it involves a lost manuscript that diaries one man's lonely battle against grotesque invaders in a remote and isolated house populated only by the narrator, his sister and his dog. There is also Coleridge like descriptions of hallucinogenic time and dimension travel since the house is a portal to the unknown.
The Haunting of Hill House By Shirley Jackson. This book is a classic in the genre and was nominated for the National Book Award in 1959. Like all my very favorite horror stories, this story is relaxed and slow to unfold and relies heavily on atmosphere, subtlety and suggestion as opposed to any outright gore or mayhem. The house chooses its permanent inhabitants and we watch spellbound as one of the characters becomes ensnared.
A great movie was made from this book, the 1963 black and white version with Claire Bloom and Julie Harris which the 1999 remake doesn't hold a candle to.
The Woman in Black by Susan Hill. This is a ripping old-fashioned Victorian ghost story by a modern writer who got it all right, in particular the setting.
This story became a very successful stage play and also fostered two cinematic versions. In my opinion the 1989 British television version was far better than the newer 2012 version with Daniel Radcliffe.
The Amityville Horror by Jay Anson which prompted my own real-life horror story, see here. Yep. This was the book I was talking about.
There has been been a lasting controversy about how truthful this book is and whether the haunting of the Amityville house was a hoax or not. To me, it simply it doesn't matter. It was written originally as a "true life" haunting story, but I think it works just as well if you take the whole thing as a work of fiction.
The interesting thing about the Amityville story when it was first written was taking the haunted house setting to a newer home in a Long Island suburb which was the scene of a particularly horrific murder. That is not uncommon today, but The Amityville Horror is the first time I can recall a modern haunting engaging the public and dominating the best seller list.
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Well, that's it for my suggestions for Halloween reading. Thank you for joining me at Books In My Life. What books or stories have scared you? Do you have any real life scary stories you would like to share?
Books In My Life is a weekly diary published every Friday morning about books that have had a particular resonance in ones life for some personal reason. If you would like to write a diary in this series please contact Phoebe Loosinhouse by Kosmail to schedule a date