Happy Halloween: 8 Books That Will Haunt You Long After Reading
“Of course, that was the whole point of the re-enactment, that we ourselves became the ghosts, learning to walk the land as they walked it two thousand years ago, to tend our fire as they tended theirs and hope that some of their thoughts, their way of understanding the world, would follow the dance of muscle and bone. To do it properly, I thought, we would almost have to absent ourselves from ourselves, leaving our actions, our re-enactions, to those no longer there. Who are the ghosts again, us or our dead? Maybe they imagined us first; maybe we were conjured out of the deep past by other minds.”
~ From Ghost Wall, by Sarah Moss
With Halloween right around the corner, I thought about putting together another list of fun, spooky reads, but I decided to dig a bit deeper this time around.
‘One of the key definitions of ‘haunt’ includes “to be persistently and disturbingly present in (the mind).”
I’m pretty sure this evokes more than a few books for many people; the ones that, no matter how much distance you seem to get between present day and when you turned the last page, still creep up on you every now and then.
Here’s my selection of such books that continue to haunt the corridors of my mind. Each one scary for its own unassuming reasons.
Ghost Wall by Sarah Moss
Set in the North of England, Ghost Wall tells the story of Silvie and her family’s summer holiday. Her father has a lifelong obsession with ancient civilisations; how they lived, worked, and hunted. For their two-week family vacation, they have joined an anthropology professor and his students to assist with a living re-enactment of these times - surviving on the tools and knowledge of the iron age.
While it begins as a seemingly innocent trip, it becomes apparent that Silvie’s father’s controlling behaviour and obsession with ensuring everything is carried out perfectly extends beyond the re-enactment. While spending time with the students, Silvie learns about another kind of life - one she longs for. As the trip reaches its peak, building a ‘ghost wall’ to ward off evil spirits, Silvie’s father’s fervour for living exactly as early man did knows no limits - including their ritual of making human sacrifices to the local bog. Ghost Wall is a haunting of a very different kind that will stay with you long after reading.
Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro
I read this in my early 20s after finding it left in a hotel reading library while travelling in Europe, and I still find myself thinking about it from time to time. Set at a remote, private boarding school called Hailsham, students are well cared for and educated, taught arts and literature and become well-mannered young adults. But throughout, there is something not quite right with how adults engage with the children. They’re allowed no contact with the outside world and taught nothing about the practicalities of life. They’re allowed to collect tokens in exchange for discarded toys, and the school halls are filled with secrets. Kathy and her friends rarely question their life until they graduate from Hailsham and start to live in the real world, discovering for the first time who - and what - they really are.
In tackling themes of memory, emotion, love and loss, Never Let Me Go highlights how we treat the vulnerable within our society, especially when those in power see them as things to be used and discarded.
The Dangers of Smoking in Bed by Mariana Enríquez
I raved about this one in my recent review and will take any opportunity to recommend it! Across twelve short stories, Enríquez drags us to the depths of humanity and back. A narrator is haunted by the rotting corpse of a tiny baby, another fetishes listening to abnormal heartbeats, becoming increasingly driven to act to hear the noises they long for, a group of friends plays with an Ouija board and conjures something more terrifying - and real - than any ghost.
Imbued with a visceral sense of terror, Enríquez’s story plant their feet firmly in the socio-political realities of her hometown Buenos Aire. In this collection, ghosts, monsters, ghouls and witches shrink in the face of the true horrors humankind inflicts on itself.
Death With Interruptions By José Saramago
What happens when the Grim Reaper decides they’re done with the job? This is the premise Death With Interruptions begins with, and it's a good one. At the start of a new year, death comes to a standstill - no one dies in the following months. What is initially celebrated by the general public quickly turns to chaos as they realise they must care permanently for their elderly relatives, those with terminal illnesses suffer indefinitely, and the question of what to do with so many people has no answer. Meanwhile, Death reflects on her experiment and starts to wonder what to do next…
Saramago was a philosopher before becoming a Nobel-Prize-winning writer, and he draws our attention to some of life’s most ponderable questions about living, grieving, death and love. It can be a challenging read to get into, but once you do, its rewards are plentiful, and you’ll find yourself thinking about it for years to come.
Earthlings by Sayaka Murata
There are no easy ways to describe Earthlings. It’s one of those books you can’t really ‘recommend’ someone read - that’s how bizarre it is - but if you want something truly ‘out there’ this Halloween, look no further.
Natsuki isn't like the other girls; in fact, she might not even be a human girl. It’s a secret she harbours until her cousin, Yuu, shares that he is also not a human boy. They spend every summer together until events threaten to part them forever. They make a simple promise: to survive, whatever the cost. For years, Natsuki gets by pretending to be ‘normal’ but is haunted by their shared secret knowledge. When an opportunity presents itself for the two to reunite, things take a gruesome, otherworldly turn.
Earthlings will haunt you for days for all the wrong reasons.
Lanny by Max Porter
Porter is an expert at blurring the boundaries between fantasy and reality, imagination and dreams - and he continues on this theme in Lanny.
Outside of London is a village, much like many other English villages, filled with families going about their lives. These lives intersect and slip by one another in many ways throughout any given day. The only difference between this village and others like it is the leafy, overgrown hermit figure, choked by tendrils growing out of his mouth; the schoolchildren have been drawing for decades; Dead Papa Toothwort.
No one knows if his legend is real or how it started, but with the arrival of a new family, including Lanny - a young boy with a zealous imagination - things are beginning to stir in the woods.
Tender is the Flesh by Agustina Bazterrica
Set in a dystopian future, a virus that only infects animals has killed off all viable meat sources worldwide - except one. Marcos makes a living assisting the ‘transitions’ of humans for consumption (although no one calls them humans anymore). Marcos mostly tries to ignore his hand in the process, spending his days worrying about his father’s dementia and ex-wife. Until one day, he is presented with a high-quality living specimen. Aware that personal contact is forbidden, Marcos builds a relationship with the specimen and soon realises just how horrifying the world has become.
A much grimmer take on some of the themes Ishiguro explores in Never Let Me go, Bazterrica inexplicably dives into just how deep the depths of human depravity can be when we know we’ll get away with it.
Human Acts by Han Kang
A violent student uprising in South Korea leads to consequences that will haunt a community for generations. When a young boy named Dong-ho is shockingly killed, others rally around to uncover the true sequence of events that led to the massacre of innocent people. From Dong-Ho’s best friend and mother to a newspaper editor, a prisoner and a factory worker, these fictional voices around a real-life historical event rise and demand to be heard.
Following the interconnected narratives of victims and their family members, Kang unfolds what happened one fateful, brutal day, giving a powerful voice to these ghosts. Heartbreaking but imbued with a deep sense of humanity, Kang’s debut book will never leave you.
Elaine Mead is a freelance writer and book reviewer, currently residing in nipaluna (Hobart), Tasmania. She is passionate about the ways we can use literature to learn from our experiences to become more authentic versions of ourselves and obsessed with showing you photos of her Dachshund puppy. You can find her online under www.wordswithelaine.com.
