Halloween Reads

‘Tis the season… and with Halloween week upon us, the clocks changed, and the darker evenings moving in, we asked some of this year’s authors to give us their top reads that are unsettling, and that send chills down their spines.

Laura McKenna recommends…

If you want to indulge the eeriness of Halloween, the edginess of creeping dusk, then revisit the master of mid-twentieth century American gothic: Ray Bradbury. There was a battered copy of The October Country at home when I was growing up and many of the 18 or so stories have stayed with me. The matricidal baby in ‘The Small Assassin’ — whose “pinkly elastic lips” haunted me ever after. In ‘The Crowd’, the same people gather to help at the scene of accidents. Or are they ensuring the victims die? ‘The Next in Line’ concerns a visit to Mexican catacombs where a woman’s fears escalate. What is the amorphous being contained within ‘The Jar’? And in the seemingly charming tale, ‘The Emissary’, a bed-ridden boy whose dog is his only contact with the outside world — and perhaps the underworld. These stories play with themes of loneliness and isolation laced with the macabre and the grotesque.

Catch Laura at our inaugural Book Train event, Fiction on the Rails, happening Saturday 9 November on the Cork to Dublin Train, where she’ll be reading from Cork Stories (which she edited) amongst other bookish activities lined up for the journey. Book here

Lucy Sweeney Byrne recommends…

I wouldn’t really categorise myself as an avid reader of spook, but now that I think of it, so much of the best writing falls into the realm of the uncanny or the outright frightening. It was tough to choose between titles like The Turn of the Screw, Wuthering Heights or The Lord of the Flies (in general, as is no doubt immediately apparent, I don’t tend to read much contemporary fiction, and so my choices probably come across as a bit fusty or obvious, but holy smoke are they unnerving). It was impossible, though, not to immediately think of that wondrous old literary witch, Shirley Jackson, when searching for a Hallowe’en read. The Haunting of Hill House is, I think, widely considered her scariest book, but there’s something about (even the mere title of) We Have Always Lived in the Castle, let alone the weird, ill-defined familial set-up therein, that I just feckin’ love. As one of her quietly violent village people might say; there’s nowt as strange as folk.

Catch Lucy at our Short Stories in Focus event on Saturday 9 November where she’ll be taking to Jan Carson about her short story collection, Let’s Dance. Book here

Estelle Birdy recommends…

I don’t remember the names of these books but they were like encyclopaedias of mysterious mysteries and they kept me from sleeping for months on end until I finally told my mother my fears and she reassured me that I probably wasn’t religious enough for stigmata to strike, that spontaneous human combustion wasn’t real and that we didn’t live anywhere near the Bermuda Triangle. Spontaneous human combustion is real and it’d be just like something that would happen to me to wake up with holes in my hands.