Well, it's time to look at all the very dark places I traveled to through book reading during the month of October. It was a frighteningly fun month of book trips. I read seven creepy books altogether.
1.) The first place I went was to Scotland in 1869. "His Bloody Project" by Graeme Macrae Burnet talked about how badly oppressed the Crofters were back then and the story of a young man who killed members of a family. It was very well done and let you see the crime through the convicted killer's eyes and then took you outside of his confession to see that there may have been another, less sympathetic story.
2.) "The Woman in Black" by Susan Hill. It takes place on the Northeast coast of England and it is a straight up CRRREEEEPPPY ghost story. It was best not to read this too close to bedtime, since it made falling asleep a little treacherous.
3.) The third scary book trip I took was to "Lovecraft Country" by Matt Ruff. It took place right after the Korean War in Jim Crow America and deals with the fact that H.P. Lovecraft was a scary racist. In this novel, it takes the form of the Lovecraft's fiction and uses the best parts of it, but the scary predator in this book is racism itself. It is very well done and entertaining and if you like Lovecraft's fiction (or even if you don't), you should definitely read this.
4.) "The Bloody Chamber" by Angela Carter is a collection of short stories, about scary fairy tales with a definite feminist twist. It took me to all kinds of dark places in Europe in a vague past.
5.) I went for some classic scary fiction for my fifth trip. "The Invisible Man" by H. G. Wells. It's a good classic Sci-Fi novel about an experiment gone wrong. I think I'll finally read "War of the Worlds" next year.
6.) "The Hunger" by Alma Katsu was about The Donner Party story with a werewolf/zombie twist. Some people complained about the ending, but I thought it was very engaging and the characters were well written. It was perfect for a Halloween month read.
7.) The last book I read for October was "The Shadow of the Wind" by Carlos Ruiz Za'fon. This was the book that I found on the street outside my house this Summer. It is a gothic type novel that takes place in Spain after the Spanish Civil War. It is a gothic novel that I loved. A friend of mine thought the writing was bad but the story was riveting. I tend to agree, but the story really made up for any other faults the novel may have had.
Now that it's November and my book journeys have been a little less unsettling. You'd think I'd be sleeping better...
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