And just like that, October draws to a close. The costumes have all been purchased, the candy set aside in decorative bowls, and the pumpkin enthusiasts among us have already exhausted our loved ones” patience for pumpkin-flavored everything-on-earth.
With the end of the Halloween season comes our fourth and final installment of A Monstrous Month. We’ve done children’s stories, YA series, and zombie lit—all exemplary fare for spooky recommendations. But in this fourth week I’d like to branch out a bit and highlight those books that are, it’s fair to say, A Different Breed of Scary. The sort of scary that keeps adults up at night, not for its direct representation of a particular demon (as tends to spook children), but rather because they, these stories, force us into long-vacant areas of discomfort, places our mind would never roam without coercion because they leave upon us such an unavoidable impression, or worse: they frighten us because they ring so true. Continue reading
October has arrived, and with it comes the best of the holidays, in my humble opinion. Though December greetings like “Merry Christmas” might ruffle many politically correct feathers and cultural leanings challenge when we may wish each other a “Happy New Year,” the fact is that no one in America has ever much disputed the mummification and candy-based panhandling of their children — not enough to incite policy changes, anyway. Halloween is my favorite holiday for reasons beyond this, of course. It dares children to scare themselves, or allow their senses to be slyly misled, just this one time a year. We have all reached our hands into a box of spaghetti and peeled grapes and hoped that we just might believe we’re feeling disembodied eyeballs and thin snaky Medusa hair. And perhaps nothing more than books has allowed us to suspend those disbeliefs and ensnare those senses. Too many good spooky books float around out in the ether for the choosing NOT to write an homage to them.
