October's bookshelf

monthly reading roundup: horror edition

Model Home by Rivers Solomon

Synopsis in a sentence: three siblings return to their family home after their parents die and confront both the deaths and the house itself.

It is my opinion as someone who reads quite a bit of horror that Solomon is one of the best modern horror writers out there. Sorrowland is one of my favourite horror reads, and I had pre-ordered Model Home based on how much I loved it. I am in awe of their prose, as always. I was highlighting like a maniac. The writing is tense when it needs to be, never overly descriptive, yet still manages to be atmospheric and add depth to the book. 

There are many layers to Model Home; it explores gender identity, Black identity, racism, ‘othering’, volatile parent and sibling relationships, generational trauma, grief, abuse, being a parent, disordered eating, among others. It never felt too much; I believe in anyone else’s hands it may have been too many themes to explore, too much confined to one book, but Solomon ties it all into the core of the book: the haunted house. 

I have made this declaration before: haunted houses are my absolute favourite trope in literature and media in general. I have read many books about haunted houses, and Model Home is up there among the best. Haunted house literature and media is at its best when the haunted house is a character, when it wouldn’t be a story at all without the haunted house. The house in Model Home is the book; it houses the story, it becomes it. 

Throughout the book the narrator makes two declarations often: Mother is God, and I am the house. They are the house because they are haunted. Mother is God because God is everything. I won’t spoil anything, but the ending puts the entire book into a different perspective, and it is masterfully done.

Solomon is one of my absolute favourite writers, there is something so fresh and distinct about their writing. They manage to distill such compelling and encompassing concepts into single sentences. I deeply appreciate the perspective Solomon brings to literature, and horror literature specifically; it is nuanced, exciting, and it’s clear they pour so much love into their work; it’s so desperately needed in the publishing landscape.

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Suture by Nic Brewer 

Synopsis in a sentence: a collection of stories — bordering on horror—about creating art

The stories in Suture involve removing a body part in order to create art, which of course speaks to the pieces of ourselves we pour into our art, whatever that may be, and that it can be gruesome and bloody. Another dimension explored in the stories that I found quite fascinating is that each artist puts the body part back into themselves after they’re finished. It is returned to its rightful place, but it is not returned unchanged. The filmmaker’s eyes lose their colour, the painter's skin is scarred, and so on and so forth. 

This book does such an effective job at portraying just how much bigger creation seems than you when you create art; how it feels indescribably larger than yourself, that feeling that you are a part of a much larger whole. It’s short and impactful and I’d highly recommend this one.

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Coup De Grâce by Sofia Ajram 

Synopsis in a sentence: a suicidal man becomes trapped in a labyrinth of never ending subway tunnels. 

This one is largely about suicide, and that’s not something I have been particularly shy about haunting me since I was a kid. It's a depressing and intimate subject and it does have to be approached and written about with tact and I think most of all some sort of understanding, and this book does all of this. 

One of the things that stood out to me in this one was the narration. It’s not detached and listless like you may expect, but rather present and resigned, yet it doesn’t make our main character un-fulfilled or flat. 

It devolves into a pick-your-own-ending, and while that certainly could have derailed the entire book, I found it a compelling way to end it. It turns the events around on the reader, and I think it hit as hard as it did because I have done my fair share of grappling with both monumental decisions and minute ones, all tangled up in suicidal ideation. It’s a bleak book; don’t expect anything particularly good to happen, but I felt it dug into what being suicidal feels like, it touched that despair that feels both insipid and fateful, like it means both nothing at all and makes up your entire world. Based on reviews, it’s a bit of a polarizing book. I think you either love it or hate it, but I, personally, love that in a book.

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Linghun by Ai Jiang 

Synopsis in a sentence: a family moves into a house in a suburb that promises to be haunted in order to reconnect with their son who died. 

This is perhaps the most compelling and original book revolving around haunted houses I’ve ever read. I know I said that about Model Home, but I’m saying it again! It’s a devastating book. It’ll make you sob. It’ll tear your insides out and you will enjoy it, because the writing is beautiful and alive. There’s this disillusionment that threads through it that shapes every word. It’s about holding on even though holding on is bleeding you dry. It is decades of grief packed into a single novella. 

The notion of an entire suburb where families move into haunted houses to reconnect with their dead loved ones is, in a word, haunting. The atmosphere is made up of longing and deep seated loss and desperation and it all comes through the writing and makes its way into the reader. 

Ai Jiang, a Chinese-Canadian immigrant, explores displacement and immigration in a way that threads each character together. The main character wants more than anything to go home, but she ends up in HOME – the suburb of haunted houses – and must reckon with her entire family's grief and the loss of both her brother and her home. I haven’t stopped thinking of this book since I read it, and I cannot recommend it enough.

From an interview with Jiang:

“I think that’s the beauty of storytelling—we not only get to offer readers a world to explore but also a world where we can wander and try to make sense of things.”

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The Twenty Days of Turin by Giorgio De Maria

Synopsis in a sentence: a man investigates the town of Turin, the twenty days in which the town was plagued by sleepwalking and violent deaths by unknown beings, and the ‘library’, where the residents confess and read each other’s deepest thoughts. 

One of the most compelling, obscure, quietly horrific novels I have ever read. The translators note sets the entire tone: they tell you that the author, a relatively unknown Italian man who was in a folk band, once, had a crisis of faith and converted to Catholicism before dying, and this is his last book, set in a fictionalized version of his hometown, but rooted in the reality of violent political factions and the tension of the times it’s set in: the ‘Years of Lead’, around 1960s - 1980s, when Italy was subject to terrorist attacks, the rise of neofascism, and an immensely fraught and complex political situation — further reading. The most mesmeric, affective horror is one that is firmly rooted in political, emotional, and personal contexts. History is rife with horror. 

The amorphous beings that haunt the town, screaming not independent of each other or with each other but against each other, represent warring political factions in Italy at the time. By making these beings such large, unknown, almost eldritch creatures, by having them use people for their battles, by creating this image of them as on a different level than humans, De Maria makes the parallels quite clear — the people of Turin were at the mercy of political violence, at the mercy of forces that seemed colossal and indifferent to their individual pain. 

Monuments look over the entire story; bodies are pulverized against them and they stand strong and unmoving, surveying the town. The use of monuments as these silent, benevolent beings only adds to the horror and political allegory; they seem to represent the constant fear and watchfulness of the residents, as well as their inability to do anything about it. 

The undertones are what makes the book, particularly the notion of a library wherein people go to confess their darkest, most perverted inner thoughts and desires, and people go to gouge themselves on others secrets — and the notion that the town needs this, desperately, that it was a product of its time, of its habitants teetering on the edge of turmoil. 

Certainly we can draw some bleak parallels from the library to social media; a black hole that consists of people screaming into it and digging up others' screams to consume. 

This book was unlike any book I’ve ever read. I’d say it requires some pre-reading about the political landscape in those times in order to fully understand and appreciate it, and be sure to read the translator’s note, but it is absolutely worth a read.

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Bone White by Ronald Malfi

Synopsis in a sentence: a man goes searching for his twin brother who disappeared in a small Alaskan town called Dread’s Hand. 

I am including this one because although I finished it in early November, I started it in October. With the premise, I think it could have been quite stale and fallen flat on the horror, but I will say this was not the case. It starts off slow, and it takes its time building the dread—perhaps more time than was needed—but I found the small details made up the horror enough that I forgave the pace for being too slow. It reminded me of a mix of True Detective season 1, for the occult-ish practices and the whole investigative aspect, and season 4, for the cold isolation and nature as this unforgiving force. I didn’t care much for the main character, but there were enough eerie townspeople, persistent and cryptic in their silence that it didn’t necessarily matter much.

Instead of giving the ‘devil’ an actual face, Malfi uses it as this pervasive force, ever-changing, and it works well for the book; I especially found the notion of a barrier of crosses and symbols keeping it contained to the woods interesting. While the ending felt a bit rushed, all in all, I would recommend it. 

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October was a month of phenomenally haunting reads, and I want to know what you read and loved or read and hated this month!

That’s all for now, take care of yourself