Halloween is, in my estimation, the reigning queen of all holidays. It has the best snacks – gummy bats! pumpkin whoopie pies! Oreo spiders with pretzel legs! popcorn balls! …ok, so let’s forget about popcorn balls – as well as the best movies, the best decorations, the best commingling of folk tradition and modern-day consumerist excess, and by far the best dress code, as evidenced by Halloween’s leading ladies, who are themselves quite plainly the best: Elvira, Morticia and Wednesday Addams, Vampira, Siouxsie Sioux. Halloween even has the best parties, though these, being parties, are a mite too fearsome for scaredy-cats like myself.
But lucky for me, Halloween also has the best books—so while braver souls are out testing their mettle with prolonged public socializing, I can stalk off to my lair’s dusky recesses for lone hours spent nursing fretful dreams with the season’s literary offerings. This year has spawned a particular wealth of eerie and eldritch nonfiction to satisfy – or sharpen, if you please – the ol’ spooky tooth.
Alice Vernon’s Ghosted: A History of Ghost Hunting, and Why We Keep Looking is an empathetic study of the deeply human yearning to sneak glimpses beyond the veil, as manifested in paranormal prying from Victorian séances to the reality TV ghost chasers of the present day. You know the type: that peculiar breed of buff men in skull t-shirts who go barging into derelict hotels, armed with night-vision goggles and EMF readers, to verbally harass the denizens of the spirit world.
Leila Taylor takes up the ghostly thread with similar thoughtfulness in Sick Houses: Haunted Homes and the Architecture of Dread, though her focus is less on the apparitions than on the dwellings they infest. Theorizing why hauntings close to home feel so singularly sinister, Taylor likens the haunted house to the possessed body: both represent violations of an individual’s innermost sanctuary, incursions that can mean permanent exile from any sense of safety.
For those who prefer to keep their creepiness strictly out of doors, Roger Luckhurst leads readers on a tour through the cultural life of the grave in Graveyards: A History of Living with the Dead. Luckhurst is an adept and eloquent guide for this excursion, as he winds through Neolithic burial sites, sprawling necropolises, tenebrous ossuaries, and the eco-conscious “green cemeteries” that have gained popularity in recent years, the fruit of our growing squeamishness about returning to the earth as toxic sludge.
Meanwhile, Eleanor Johnson’s Scream with Me: Horror Films and the Rise of American Feminism (1968-1980) disinters much for film buffs to contemplate, a perfect pairing with scary movie marathons and heaping bowls of candy corn. Building on the work of feminist film scholars like Laura Mulvey, conceptualizer of the oft-cited “male gaze,” Johnson analyzes infamous horror classics like Rosemary’s Baby and The Exorcist for their reverberations with the burgeoning women’s movement of the 1970s. For Johnson, the true nightmares these films expose are not supernatural, but sociopolitical: the dreadful realities of women’s lives under patriarchy.
And if you’re unnerved that anyone should delight in such ghoulish reading material, please permit me to direct you to Coltran Scrivner’s Morbidly Curious: A Scientist Explains Why We Can’t Look Away. According to Scrivner, a psychologist and researcher, our cultural mania for the macabre is not as depraved as it would on first glance appear. Rather, he offers reassurance to my my mother (among others) that an appetite for darkness is, in fact, surprisingly wholesome, helpfully preparing us mere mortals for a world seemingly mined with deathtraps.
But horrifying though it may be out there, I do hope that this Halloween, at least, is only as spine-tingling as suits your tastes, with no unwonted terrors, and a perfectly delectable balance of tricks and treats.
