Some of my favorite horror media 1

 I always used to say I don't like horror as a genre. That is not quite true, or it is not quite true anymore. Horror is such a varied genre with a multitude of utterly different subgenres that it is hard to decry the genre as a whole. And while it is true that still there are horror stories or subgenres I generally do not enjoy and would not usually seek out (slasher horror in most cases, anything revolving around torture, for example), there are also many horror stories I do like greatly, that affect me and that I connect to. So for this Halloween I decided to recommend to you some of my favorite horror media. 

Hard mode, I cannot recommend anything I have recommended before which tragically eliminates one of my absolute favorite horror short stories Brian Evenson's Smear. Check the recommendation tag for those. 

Let's start off with a simple definition. According to the Encyclopaedia Britannica a horror story is "a story in which the focus is on creating a feeling of fear". The Encyclopaedia stresses the genres roots in folk tales and as such it is a genre as old as storytelling itself. Ever since there were people weaving tales for each other, they were telling scary stories intended to frighten. And so I, too, like to be disturbed.

I'll give you five for this year. 

 Shirley Jackson's novel The Haunting of Hill House (not to be confused with the show with the same name) is to me a quintessential haunted house tale. A researcher invites guests into a mansion to study their reactions to the buildings supposed haunting. One of the guests, Eleanor, who takes care of her sick mother and lives a withdrawn life, sees more of the haunting than the others do and begins to be drawn into the house and its ghostly effects. The main selling point to me is the entwining of the characters' psyches with the haunting itself. It's not just ghosts - it's your loneliness and your grief and your trauma. Fantastic example of the genre I like to call 'the house is only haunted because you are'.

I've watched the TV show Midnight Mass because I do love vampires and everything to do with them. It's got a great atmosphere of slow and creeping unease and a - to me - fresh take on the vampire mythos. The beloved priest of a small and isolated island town returns from a pilgrimage transformed into his young and healthy self. This is not, however, the only transformation. I greatly enjoyed how the priest recontextualizes his vampiric transformation into something pure and divine and how he convinces (almost) everyone around him so he may hold onto his belief. The vampire here is grief and an inability to let go and the destructive powers those hold.

 

Jeff Vandermeer's novel Annihilation (not to be confused with the movie of the same name) hit me so deeply that I found the movie - although it is brilliant - and its changes hard to stomach. I have since made my peace with the movie on its own merits but still hold the novel dear. A woman sets out to research a mostly unknown area where her husband formerly disappeared and later mysteriously reappeared. As soon as she and her companions enter, the boundaries between what is real and not as well as between her and the area begin to blur. I adore the protagonist's gradual loss of identity as well as a connection to the theme of alienation. This novel may have been the start of my appreciation of leaving the audience guessing, of not explaining and the unknown.

I found  Which Super Little Dead Girl (TM) Are You? Take Our Quiz and Find Out! by Nino Cipri in a Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy collection. It's short horror fiction in the form of a personality quiz. You can find out which Super Little Dead Girl TM, a group of heroic dead girls, you are. During the quiz you find out about the girls and their gruesome and tragic deaths. Apart from the unusual storytelling style I love the unsettling answers that hint at the reality of the girls.

Maybe it's cheating to recommend a Magnus Archives episode because I have written about it. But that wasn't technically a recommendation, so: "Killing Floor". In the story Jonathan Sims, the archivist of an institution collecting spooky stories, reads out the story of a man who works on the killing floor of a meat processing plant. The horror here is both about consumption and flesh as well as the inescapable nature of the meat grinder that is having a job under capitalism. Extremely unsettling to me.

 

Books of 2023

A quick round up of the novels I read last year:

Maggie Stiefvater - Greywaren 

 

Third installment of the Dreamers trilogy in which different people, some with mythological powers, some not, try to prevent a catastrophe caused by resentment and megalomania. It takes place in the same universe as the Raven Cycle books (which I have not read). Unfortunately, I found the conclusion to the trilogy disappointing as especially the way some characters’ arcs ended fell flat for me. This might, however, not be a failure of the book per se as I’ve noticed my tastes changing over the last year and a half. Maybe YA just isn’t for me anymore. Over the trilogy I have found myself gravitating to the older characters and I truly cannot blame Maggie Stiefvater for not concentrating on them in her YA series.

3/5

 

Becky Chambers - To Be Taught If Fortunate

I love Becky Chambers’ novels. She is one of my favorite Sci Fi writers and so I was excited to start this novella. In it, a quartet of astronauts is sent out to seek out distant planets and catalog the life they might house. The story is, in my opinion, a beautiful and poetic look at space exploration and the inner life of the people who do it. Despite it being shock-full of intricate descriptions of possible new worlds out there it feels very grounded in reality due to its basis in science. And in fact, it achieves what I find so appealing about space in the first place, the connection of logic and emotion and how there’s beauty in science.

5/5

 

This is in retrospect my favorite book I read in 2023.

T.J. Klune - The House in the Cerulean Sea

 

A very sweet story about a middle-aged man stuck in his dead-end job as supernatural orphanage inspector given the opportunity to experience joy and love and make a difference when he is sent to inspect a secret orphanage inhabited by only the most dangerous of supernatural children. I enjoyed the world building here very much as well as the characters and their relationships to each other. Writing children is very tricky but all the kids here - despite their supernatural nature - felt like actual children. A story about difference and the beauty that comes from it.

4.5/5



The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2022

I read these every year and I do indeed plan on doing more top 4 stories from these. This year was a reminder on why I can basically ignore amazon reviews because despite the reviews for this year’s collection being largely negative I enjoyed many of the stories within greatly and the collection as a whole much more than the one that came before. The theme with this one was hope and resilience and that appealed to me much more than last year’s focus on grief. Anyway, included some bangers and generally solid.

4/5


Susanna Clarke - Piranesi

I went into it not knowing what to expect at all. It simply caught my eye at a train station book shop. There is a man who lives in a House. The House is eternal and provides him with all he needs, he has never left the House and does not know anything outside of it, but then one day mysterious happenings start to heap up and all he knew may crumble down. My favorite part of the novel was getting into Piranesi’s mind and his world. Susanna Clarke has a beautiful way with words that drew me right in and let me experience the House in the way Piranesi did. The conclusion and the explanation gives context to what was disconnected before and though it does reduce the dreamy quality of mysticism that reigned before it furthers the main character’s arc and struggle with identity.

4/5


Margaret Atwood - Hag-Seed

This is an installment of a - sadly discontinued, I would have loved to see Gillian Flynn’s interpretation of Hamlet - collection of Shakespeare retellings. This one was a gift from a friend who knows well how much I like Shakespeare and Margaret Atwood. This is her take on The Tempest. A play I have studied in university and watched in the theater (and I like it, that, too). I really enjoyed her approach of centering the theatrical aspect of the play and having it revolve around a production of this same play as this telling’s Prospero is an unfairly ousted theater producer who puts on a production of The Tempest in a prison to get revenge on those who wronged him.

4/5


Claire Kohda - Woman, Eating

What attracted me to this book first, was the cover. Not the one here, because this one is the one I did end up buying and it’s a different one.) And of course, themes of women and food/eating are very dear to me. Khoda tells the story about a young woman, half vampire on her mother's side, who moves to London to pursue a career in the arts. Away from her overbearing mother for the first time in her life, she struggles with her identity and sustenance, which is inextricably linked to the former. It’s all tied together with her mixed heritage (her dad was Japanese, her mom is half Malaysian and half white), womanhood, budding romantic feelings, morality and artistic self-expression. I always enjoy stories about people struggling with and discovering their identity and this is no exception. I especially like that the novel deals with the difficulties and set-backs self-discovery can have.

4/5


Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone - This Is How You Lose the Time War

This novel became an internet phenomenon which ironically made me reluctant to read it. Given tags such as ‘time travel’ and ‘enemies to lovers’ it didn’t exactly sound promising to me. Then I picked it up in a bookstore and read a couple of pages and was intensely intrigued. It is a sci-fi epic of love and connection and how it has the power to change our world view and who we are. El-Mohtar and Gladstone employ beautifully lyrical language to explain their esoteric concepts of the time traveling spies of two warring factions and how they begin to communicate, grow closer and ultimately form a bond like no other.

5/5

 

TJ Klune - In the Lives of Puppets

As I had read and enjoyed another TJ Klune novel this year and because I do love living robots as a general rule, buying this book was a no-brainer. After robots took over the earth a robotic inventor lives a peaceful life with his human son, a nurse-bot and a roomba in the forest. When the son finds a humanoid robot in a garbage pile and the father gets kidnapped, a journey of exploration begins. I loved the different characters and the world Klune created in this coming-of-age story, but I couldn’t quite get into it as I had with his other novel.

3.5/5