I enjoy reading horror in October; it's the spooky season, after all! So here's a roundup of what I've been reading this month, in the order I read it.

Seed by Ania Ahlborn - First and, unfortunately, least. The first half of the book was solidly spooky and interesting; then things went completely off the rails in the second half. It's set in small-town Louisiana, where a couple's marriage is struggling under the strain of class differences (he's a musician who works as a boat mechanic; she's from the town's upper-middle-class aristocracy and married down), with two young daughters. Driving his family home late at night, he veers to avoid the reflection of eyes in the road and flips the car. While the family is climbing out of the wrecked car, one of the little girls wanders off, and he finds her staring off into the woods. After that, Weird Stuff starts to happen.

It's genuinely very spooky and compelling at first, as strange poltergeist-like activity happens in the house, and the other girl becomes terrified of her sister and afraid to spend time in their bedroom. Also, it becomes clear that the dad knows more about the haunting than he's telling (and it soon turns out that what's happening to his daughter now, also happened to him as a kid). But the more overt the haunting/possession gets, the less scary it is, and this book manages to achieve an unfortunate mix of factors where it tells you too much about what's going on to maintain the spooky factor, while also not telling you enough to make it make sense. By the end, the characters appear to have lost their will to live and just decide that their fate is to die, and it all ends in a bloodbath of which the possessed 6-year-old killer is the only survivor. We last see her hitchhiking out of town, covered in blood, to repeat the cycle elsewhere. Okay then!


The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson - A classic which I've never read! I went into it knowing absolutely nothing except that there was a haunted house (probably). And I really enjoyed it! Unexpectedly, it reminded me somewhat of The Secret History - not in any overt way, but it was something about the lushly vivid setting + the powerful and unhealthy emotional bonds the characters form almost immediately + the not exactly subtextual yet not entirely wholly textual queerness.

Anyway, I had a really good time! POOR ELEANOR; you spend the whole book feeling so sorry for her while also cringing because you can see the terrible outcome of each of her various life choices coming from a mile away. It was interesting reading this back to back with the above book, because Jackson also doesn't tell you what's going on but in a way where there's a strong sense of an underlying cohesiveness to it all where you keep wanting to scrutinize it closer to pick out significant details and find the connections that are clearly there but are not made wholly explicit in the text. And Hill House with its just-out-of-kilter architecture and its muted sense of wrongness is a wonderful setting.


Salem's Lot by (do I even have to say this?) Stephen King - This was a reread, but I last read this book probably 25 or 30 years ago (possibly in the 90s) and I remembered absolutely NOTHING ... well, okay, I remembered one thing, but since it takes a while to show up, I spent the first third or so of the book going "Wait, isn't this the one with

spoiler

vampires?"

And it is, but it appears to be something else early on - in fact, now that I think about it, this is a quality not only of a lot of his books but also other classic horror (Haunting of Hill House has it too) where there are multiple supernatural things (or supernatural-ish, or horror-ish) going on in one book - it's not just the characters vs X supernatural thing, but there's darkness happening at multiple layers, some supernatural and some human.

It was fascinating to read this with vague recollections floating in from when I read it along with a ton of other King back in the 90s, but through the eyes of my current self who has 25+ years of writing, professional and otherwise, and thinking about writing and literary analysis behind me, as well as being much more familiar with his work overall than I probably was when I read this book before. (Also, this is an old 1970s paperback that I got from some used bookstore, and so the inside page is just "Also by Stephen King: Carrie." WILD!!)

But I can now see how much this is sort of proto-King, working out his themes and fascinations and tropes as he goes along. I think King as a more mature writer would have handled some aspects of this book differently - in particular, I think he'd drag out the buildup longer and might not write the vampires in quite so overt a horror-movie way. (Though maybe he would: you can also see his deftness with theme in the sense that the whole book is drawing on classic horror movie tropes from the haunted(?) house to the kid's fascination with movie monsters. I also didn't know anything about Dracula, the book, when I read this before, and can now see more of how this is meant to be a Dracula retelling, But In Rural Maine, to a much greater degree than any other modern vampires-as-baddies media I've run across that wasn't obviously a Dracula adaptation.) And you can also see the development of the vividness of character and location that is so much a thing in his books, and the textural sense of the town as a place. I had forgotten how many of his early books have a literary-experiment vibe to them.


Blister by Jeff Strand - This is my first of his books, and I will definitely be reading more! "Twisty" doesn't even describe this book; I generally had no idea what was going to happen from one chapter to the next, and while it's possible to guess where at least *some* of it was going, then it would throw another curve ball at me. But underneath it all, it was genuinely very sweet. If it reminded me of anything else, it's Jason Pargin's books (the "John Dies At the End" guy) - bizarre and twisty and gory/disgusting in places but sweeter than you'd expect underneath it all.

This is not supernatural horror, though I went in unsure if it was going to be or not; it's more in the slasher/thriller/dysfunctional small town category, but also kind of its own thing. It's difficult to even describe the setup without it sounding completely bizarre, but here goes: a cartoonist has a meltdown at some kids and goes off to his agent's cabin in the middle of nowhere while the PR frenzy dies down, where he finds out about the local legend of Blister, and some of the local rednecks decide to show Blister to him. And then stuff happens. A lot of stuff happens.

It was just a really weird and interesting book, and I look forward to reading more of his stuff!