Spooky Season Reading

The older I get, the more I find myself becoming a creature of ritual. I don't know why, exactly. I think it has to do with wanting to mark the accelerating passage of the year. At my age, it can slip by almost completely unnoticed if you don't make a special effort to feel it happen. This requires us to participate in the seasons; make the gumbo when the weather turns cold, eat the king cake on Jan 6... wait, are these all gonna be food?  

Maybe not all of them. I'm also in the habit of trying to find the best spooky books to read during this time every year. That's easier said than done. So much horror in books and movies turns out to be trash. It's easy enough to be grossed out by cheap schlock. (And hey sometimes that's exactly what we're in the mood for!) But, like I said, I'm doing these rituals for the sake of.. I dunno... spiritual communion with the season, or something like that. The good Halloween books are more atmospheric than shocking. In the best ones you might even find something profoundly moving.

This October I read six spooky books covering a wide variety here of style, of form and of audience.  There are picture books for children, a graphic collection for teens, as well as some fiction for adults. Anyway, here's list. 

The Skull by Jon Klassen (2023)

Klassen might be my favorite children's author and illustrator.  A girl runs away into the woods. We aren't told why, exactly. She comes to an abandoned house where she befriends a disembodied skull. The skull can talk. It can move a little bit. It can even taste the food and drink the girl feeds it. Or at least it politely says that it can. Like the girl, though, the skull is also hiding from something it will need her help to escape. Klassen's re-telling of this folk tale is, I think, about processing trauma and what it means to choose your own family. The illustrations are lovely and the text is imbued with his trademark existential wit.

How To Sell A Haunted House by  Grady Hendrix (2023)

There's a lot to like in this novel it but it was maybe a little too much TV melodrama for me. The title says, haunted house, but really this is a haunted doll story. A single mother is a tech engineer in Silicon Valley when she learns that her parents way back home in Charleston have suddenly died. This requires her to fly across the county and settle the estate with her estranged fuck-up of a brother. What ensues then is a plot where unfinished family issues must be confronted and secrets... um... unearthed. Drama tropes and horror tropes abound.  Still, it's clever and even a little funny in spots and there are some interesting ideas in it about art and performance and memory.

In The Dark by Kate Hoefler (2023)

This is a picture book about community and acceptance of outsiders. Pages depict alternating points of view between villagers witnessing a mysterious group of newcomers (witches?) to the nearby woods and a competing narrative told by the newcomers themselves. The brief text and gorgeous pictures make this a great read aloud. 

A Night of Screams: Latino Horror Stories Edited by Richard Z. Santos (2023) 

Mostly a collection of sketches, many of them quite short. Some compelling ideas, though. Does a hurricane leave ghosts in its wake? Is an aging couple stalked by El Chupacabra or the idea of death? Is the noise next door La Llorona or an even more terrifying reality? Little evocative ideas are often better than drawn out novels in this genre.

Through The Woods by Emily Carroll (2014)

This graphic collection was recommended to me on Bluesky after I began a thread of these. The stories here have moody elements of folk tales and Victorian gothic. Much like the short story sketches in "Night of Screams" these vignettes are evocative pieces to read at night. Both of those books were great for Halloween mood setting. 

The Marigold by Andrew F. Sullivan (2023)

A not-too-distant future Toronto is falling apart. Its physical and social infrastructure are neglected and rotting away amid the forces of capitalism and climate change. Gig workers and civil servants struggle to keep heads above water (often literally as street floods and sinkholes proliferate.) At the top of the precarious social order, a territorial battle is taking place between a corporation in charge of a "smart cities" style privatized district and an old line set of real estate developers trying to maintain family legacies. 

The titular "Marigold" tower is one such legacy. Permitted, we learn, through a ritualistic boardroom gathering of oligarchs somewhat reminiscent of a Comus ball and built, in accordance with custom, on top of a literal human sacrifice, the building is a manifestation of the city's longstanding way of doing business. One of Sullivan's characters describes it this way.

"They would say they aren't monsters. The system works out, so their hands are clean. In the past, people were walled into these places alive. Now when they do it, they'll say it's humane. These people don't care, and they want you to not care either. Everything you own comes from bodies and blood, one way or another. Your phone. Your clothes. The good things you have are primarily drawn from the misfortune of others. Blood, sweat, tears. All of it literal."

In the face of the economic and climate crisis, though, the condo development, like the entire city, is failing. Meanwhile, a mysterious mold is growing out of the ground where all this blood and exploitation was sewn and is beginning to threaten everyone. 

The Marigold is set in Toronto but I kept thinking about New Orleans.  You could probably insert any city into this narrative. For example, it was hard not to read this novel without thinking of the conglomeration of private real estate developers, university boards, and tax exempt non-profits in control properties like Charity Hospital. 

Nearly five years after a team of developers was selected to bring Charity Hospital back to life, the landmark building's renovation is at least two years behind schedule and in need of more money to get the project back on track.

Officials involved with the project have recently brought in a new developer to help jump start the renovations, which have seen delays due to the pandemic and soaring construction costs.

According to one person familiar with the project's financing, the costs have risen to well north of $500 million from around $300 million two years ago.

The image of a city's social elite literally building their wealth on top of the bodies and bones of the poor comes further into focus with this macabre bit I remembered from having read Kathryn Olivarius's Necropolis: Disease, Power, and Capitalism in the Cotton Kingdom last year.

If we were to travel back in time to October 1833, when John Wyeth was digging mass graves, and sat in the Cabildo's public gallery to listen to the deliberations of New Orleans's city council, we might not realize that the city was in the grips of its worst yellow fever epidemic in a generation. We would hear detailed discussions concerning the oyster shells being used to pave a new road out to Lake Pontchartrain; debates about city attorney salaries; estimates for the amount of wood needed for a flying bridge; and fights about the cost of lantern oil for the cotton exchange. Across the road in the mayor's office, the conversation might center on city finances or the schedule of the city guard. There would be little to no discussion about the horrific situation at the Charity Hospital less than a mile away, where unclaimed corpses baking under the sun outside had recently exploded. Nothing either about the roughly 300 immigrants around the corner in Marigny who had just died from yellow fever. 

The elite culture of apathetic fatalism ran deeper than silence. New Orleans's city fathers actively avoided discussing yellow fever, even at the height of epidemics, instead preoccupying themselves with finances, zoning, and parochial matters like bread weights. Aldermen considered it a poor use of political capital to seek out means to resolve or ameliorate disease. Some believed the fatal status quo was intractable and that there was nothing to be gained by raising controversial topics like quarantine, which did little but produce shouting matches and inflame the ire of businessmen. Others were weary of discussing disease which inevitably morphed into conversations about other sensitive issues like taxes, regulation or immigration

There's much in Olivarius's book about Yellow Fever that foreshadows the political response to COVID, no doubt. But the larger point, I think, is illustrated in Sullivan's novel, where the fundamental issue, as always, comes down to who decides who gets what, no matter the circumstances, and the futility of thinking that those fundamentals could ever change. As one of his protagonists concludes, "It didn't matter what you knew. The future was owned by someone else, someone bigger than you, someone or something that didn't even pay taxes." 

Anyway, Happy Halloween.  I suppose it was the spirit of this real estate horror novel that inspired this year's Jack-O-Lantern.  I give you, Joe Jaeger's Crumbling Plaza Tower of Terror.

 

And one more passage from Sullivan describing what's going on with one of his characters whose family has parlayed its wealth from slumlording into luxury condo development.

Another revenue stream, another way to maximize return on tragedy. A building wouldn't do anymore. The very act of holding onto a property was immoral. He reconciled himself to that years ago, welcomed his role as the villain. To be an owner, to be a landlord, meant someone had to be subjugated. The other developers who talked around those facts were kidding themselves, doing their best put some polish on an ancient profession. Humans couldn't survive without a roof over their head. A building gave you more time, sometimes decades. To deny anyone that, well, you'd need to be a monster, wouldn't you?