DBF21 Authors’ Top Halloween Reads

It’s a brand-new anthology, just this morning landed on my desk, hot off the press from Blackstaff, so I can’t yet vouch for the contents, but it has me at the title: The Black Dreams: Strange Stories from Northern Ireland, which comes, of course, from Louis MacNeice’s poem “Autobiography” (“When I was five the black dreams came / Nothing after was quite the same”). In his excellent Introduction, editor Reggie Chamberlain-King talks of wanting to find a new way of looking at Northern Irish literature: mapping strange territories of in-between states and unstable realities in a place where “things are not as they seem”. Perfect reading for a season when the veils between places and states are thin.

You have to respect a book that wears its themes on its bloody sleeve. Tell Me I’m Worthless tells you outright that at the rotten core of this haunted house story is fascism, which lives everywhere, from the foundation of your apartment building to the intangible floating around your computer screen. However terrifying it is to read about those concentrations of rot, it’s extremely cathartic to see them unflinchingly confronted. If you want to get unabashedly intense for Halloween, eschewing the comfortably spooky for the downright horrifying, Rumfitt has written the nightmare for you. Alison Rumfitt will join the Small Trans Library to discuss trans horror on November 1st, so you can hear more about this modern gothic masterpiece at: tinyurl.com/STLhorror

For many readers, Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House is the ultimate tale of terror. Rapt, we read on – but the true chill comes, perhaps, from the doubts that Jackson instills in her readers’ minds. Is Hill House itself truly a place of horror? – or does this horror and madness lie in the minds and hearts of the people who live there?

My two year old and I have been enjoying this spooky tale over the last few weeks. It’s the perfect ‘gentle spook’ for a small child to enjoy at Halloween. The smiling ghosts, cheeky vampire and bats and cats in all our favourite Dublin spots is a fun introduction to spookiness on our first proper Halloween. A great Irish read for parents of young kids.

Readers of age 9+ will love Mr Spicebag. It starts: ‘George lived in a small town where everyone was obsessed with spice bags. Well nearly everyone.’ and it’s a cracking fantasy adventure novel featuring a ten-year-old boy who has a magical talent for putting spices together to create new spells. When he’s forced to work for the owner of the local chipper, Mr Spicebag, he gets caught up in a plot to take over the world by changing everyone into animals. Funny and creative, with terrific line drawings by Helen O’Higgins, this is a wonderful debut.