Halloween Reads Recommended by DBF25 Authors

To get you in the seasonal spirit for the Halloween weekend ahead, we caught up with some of this year’s authors to get their recommendation for a book that is bound to send chills down your spine…

Caroline Madden recommends…

This Halloween season, I’m cosying up with Sheridan Le Fanu’s spine-chilling collection of gothic horror tales, In a Glass Darkly. Henry James described Le Fanu’s writing as the “ideal reading in a country house for the hours after midnight”, and I couldn’t agree more — if only I had the country house! Le Fanu’s female vampire novella Carmilla is a standout in the collection and, interestingly, is thought to have been a significant inspiration for Bram Stoker’s Dracula. I’m drawn to Le Fanu’s writing not only because he is a master of weaving Irish folklore into supernatural stories, but also he because he is the great-nephew of that talented rogue Richard Brinsley Sheridan, the acclaimed 18th century playwright who inspired the far-from-ideal husband in my debut novel The Marriage Vendetta. Clearly storytelling runs in the Sheridan blood!

Catch Caroline discussing The Marriage Vendetta at What Lies Beneath on Saturday 8 November.

Dave Tynan recommends…

On the first page of Yuri Herrera’s Signs Preceding The End Of The World (translated by Lisa Dillman) Makina nearly falls into a sinkhole. So opens up the earth and the underworld in this relentless sharp wonder of a book. My copy is a toenail over 100 pages but holds worlds as it demands you keep up with this young woman’s quest from Mexico to the United States to find her brother. It’s almost hard to believe it was published back in 2009 in its original Spanish. There’s a lesson in that for us anglos. Herrera’s maxim that “style is a form of knowledge” is another one. I can’t say enough about it. It’s such a deeply known and felt depiction of these journeys, of the rending of generations, of a heart like a fist in a cold world. You could read it in one day and think about it for years and I think you should.

Catch Dave discussing his debut short story collection We Used to Dance Here at Short Stories in Focus on Friday 7 November.

Gill Perdue recommends…

There are stories that raise goose pimples along your forearms, shivers of dread down your spine, and a creeping sense of unease which render them unforgettable. Sinéad Crowley’s The Belladonna Maze had that effect on me. In the story Grace comes to work as a nanny in Hollowpark, a mysterious crumbling mansion in the west of Ireland. Hollowpark is a place of dark secrets; where a young girl entered the Belladonna Maze at the heart of the garden and was never seen again. The maze is named after a deadly poison. Will her quest to solve the sinister riddle have fatal consequences for Grace? I was similarly gripped and truly terrified by Andrea Carter’s There Came a Tapping. The title alone is enough to raise the chills. Remote haunted cottage – check. Missing husband – check. A flock of ravens – check.  And always the tap-tap-tapping. This is a gripping and compelling read. And I just have to mention the absolute classic The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde which seared itself into my subconscious when I read it as a teenager. Dorian, a beautiful young man, is painted by Basil Hallward, an artist infatuated with his beauty. The success of the portrait brings Dorian into a world of hedonism and corruption. Dorian, knowing that his beauty will fade with time, sells his soul and chooses that the portrait rather than himself, should age and fade. He hides it in the attic. And oh, the creeping dread as you imagine the portrait slowly changing, the flesh collapsing, the soul-rot infiltrating every molecule. I could almost smell it. Terrifying. 

Catch Gill discussing her thriller The Night I Killed Him at The Lure of Crime Writing on Sunday 9 November.

Brendan Mac Evilly recommends…

Olga Tokarczuk’s The Empusium is a quietly unnerving novel that chills in the most elegant and endearing way. Set in a remote mountain sanatorium in 1913, it follows Mieczysław Wojnicz, a frail newcomer among a circle of verbose, decaying men who pass their days coughing, philosophising and pontificating while the world — and their bodies — slowly rot. Autumn thickens in the lush Central European forest that surrounds them; fungi bloom, the air turns damp, and death lingers at the edge of every scene, drawing ever closer. The book seems to yearn for death itself, as if the narrator — a calm, omniscient presence who might be the Earth itself, or Mother Nature — is guiding events toward an inevitable sacrifice. Tokarczuk writes with wry humour about male fragility and intellectual decay, capturing the slow collapse of both body and mind, the prose and tone tripping along with a joyful death lust. A playful riff on Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain, The Empusium is philosophical yet most definitely entertaining — eerie, ironic, and saturated with the moods and colours of autumn. Best enjoyed by the fireside, it’s a story that reverberates with beauty even as it contemplates our collective decay. Is this, perhaps, what one calls cli-fi?

Catch Brendan discussing his novel Deep Burn at our DBF After Dark Festival Club: Echoes on the Page on Friday 7 November.

Gethan Dick recommends…

I can’t stomach the grotesque, I blame the Irish Medical Journal. My dad used to be a GP and you’d be looking for a sheet of paper or a book in a pile of stuff and turn something over and have a full-colour photograph of a pustulating rash or injury-deformed digit right in your face. So gross. I still don’t like anything icky (unless it’s real – if you’ve actually cut your head open I’m totally fine) so for a scary book I prefer creepy to gory. House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski is great – bear with me, because I know it has a reputation for being long and convoluted and annoying to read and making you look like a tosser if you take it with you on the bus (and all those things are essentially true) but there’s something about the utter wrongness of the house that really stays with you and the way that the characters pathetically try to lie or shoot or screw away their fear is brilliantly human. Next time you’re doing DIY don’t forget to listen out for the low growl when you discover a gap that shouldn’t be there between the door jam and the supporting wall… It’s just fiction though – anyone who actually wants the shit scared out of them should try facts, for example this.

Catch Gethan discussing her debut novel Water in the Desert, Fire in the Night at Emerging Voices, Thursday 6 November.