R.I.P. Catch-Up (Part III): Donoghue, Dunmore, Hahn, Thummler
I’m behind on all the things. In the first of several catch-up posts, I’ll take a quick look back at the other spooky reads I picked up last month. This is my third post for Readers Imbibing Peril, after one on scary story collections and another on two East Anglian horror novels.
Kissing the Witch by Emma Donoghue (1997)
This is a terrific set of retellings of European fairytales, some I recognized (Cinderella, Rapunzel, Hansel and Gretel, The Little Mermaid) and some I didn’t. Each of the 13 stories is a first-person testimonial, and they all run into each other in a satisfying way because there are no speech marks and at the end the narrator of one asks a question that sparks a character to tell the next one, and so on. Many of them have cautionary elements (“In the days when wishing was having, I got what I wished and then I wished I hadn’t”) so there is sometimes an air of regret, but elsewhere there is defiance of convention. Maids lord their power over princesses and witches manipulate feuding spouses. As the title suggests, there is a queer slant to many to these familiar narratives. Witches aren’t evil hags to be shunned but alluring sexual creatures, making for some cheeky twist endings. This was a random choice from Donoghue’s back catalogue but might actually be one of my favourites from her oeuvre. (Secondhand – Awesomebooks.com with voucher) 
The Greatcoat by Helen Dunmore (2012)
{SPOILERS IN THIS ONE}
I’m always surprised by how much Dunmore published, especially in a life cut short by cancer; her bibliography is full of titles I’ve never heard of. So this commissioned horror novella was an unexpected discovery. Isabel is a newlywed in 1952 Yorkshire. Her husband, Philip Carey, is a doctor who’s often away on emergency house calls. Until she fulfils everyone’s expectations by falling pregnant, she will have little to occupy herself beyond cooking and cleaning, with the landlady always stomping about overhead. It’s a bitter winter and one day she pulls an old RAF greatcoat from the back of a wardrobe to put over the bedclothes. The garment seems to summon the soldier who once wore it at a local airfield, Alec, and as he starts to visit more frequently, Isabel channels the memories of the woman who carried on an affair with him. The ghost lover is nothing novel, but possession by the past experiences of another person who’s still alive was a new one on me. I wasn’t sure Dunmore always demarcated the real and the imaginary effectively; then again, that’s part of the point of horror. Anyway, a quick and easy read, and what happened to Isabel’s parents during the war is a good way of pointing up the everyday trauma that many were living with in that decade. (Little Free Library) 
The Time of the Witch by Mary Downing Hahn (1982)
This might be the first book I ever got signed at an author event, aged 10. I don’t specifically recall reading it as a child, but I think it must be a reread for me. (Some of Hahn’s other titles listed inside the book ring a bell, anyway.) Laura and her little brother Jason come from the Washington, D.C. area to stay with Aunt Grace in West Virginia for the summer while their parents finalize their divorce. When Laura learns that there is a nearby witch, an old woman named Maude who goes around with a crow on her shoulder, she decides to ask for a spell to bring her parents back together. But, as happens with these sorts of stories, her request has unforeseen consequences and she soon wants to take it all back. This was so very ’80s, the names and descriptions of the locals are stereotypical “hick” fodder, and it’s a pretty predictable message to accept what you cannot control and trust that adults know what they’re doing. I’m sure I found it suspenseful as a kid, but I doubt this one has stood the test of time. (Gift – purchased new by my mother at a Bowie Library event in 1994)
Sheets & Lights by Brenna Thummler (2018; 2023)
I finished off this teen graphic novel trilogy (the middle book is Delicates) by rereading parts of the first volume that I missed out on when my NetGalley download expired, and finding the third book I never got to. Middle schooler Marjorie Glatt works in her family’s laundromat in small-town Pennsylvania. Since her mother died, it’s just been her, her little brother, and their absent-minded father. When she starts seeing the ghost of a little boy named Wendell – and ghosts in this world are literally just sheets with eye-holes – he makes her life more complicated but also acts as a bridge to another dimension she’s been denying. With his mischief, he also helps her to resist the buyout offer of awful Mr. Saubertuck, who keeps threatening to turn the laundromat into a yoga retreat center.
In the other two volumes, Marjorie makes friends with Eliza, a ghost photographer, and they help Wendell investigate his own untimely death. Whereas Eliza is bullied and feels like an outcast, Marjorie makes some friends among the popular girls and tries to bring her two friend circles together, with mixed results. I like the pastel, kitsch 1980s-90s vibe of these comics, though Thummler can’t really draw noses, at least not on white people. I would recommend the series for younger teens. (Public library) 
Any stand-out creepy reading for you this year?
East Anglian Horror for #RIPXXI: Sara Bayat and Natasha Pulley
My first Readers Imbibing Peril post featured three short story collections. I have more spooky reads to catch up on tomorrow, but today I’m featuring two 2026 works of East Anglian horror with fetching purple and black covers that I read during October. (This might seem like a niche subgenre, but I can actually think of several other books I’ve read that fit into the same tradition; if not all set in Norfolk/Suffolk, they still evoke fenland settings: The Woman in Black by Susan Hill, The Hotel by Daisy Johnson, and Wakenhyrst by Michelle Paver.) Both:
Hesket: A Norfolk Haunting by Sara Bayat
I bought this after I saw Bayat speak at Marlborough Literature Festival last month. Eight linked chapters, bookended by a prologue and epilogue, colour in a picture of a Norfolk village plagued by strange events when a housing development disturbs the ground. Each character has a source of isolation: Isla and her husband have drifted apart since their daughter died; Nell lives in a retirement home and has lost her dearest friend; Emir doesn’t fit in with the other allotment gardeners due to his ethnic background – even though he was raised in England; and Arthur has extreme social anxiety and an unhealthy attachment to a woman old enough to be his mother.
Bayat is careful to share out the sympathy, including to a tree surgeon involved in cutting down the woods for the construction project and the well-meaning vicar who sometimes oversteps her duties and at the same time fails her family. Loss links her characters, from the participants at the séance local journalist Rio reports on to Finn and his single dad. The discovery of bones and the appearance of a ghost are reminders of medieval atrocities. Nine women were executed as witches here, and the injustice lingers. Alice Spry was drowned in the River Wensum, her body never recovered. She lives on in the name of Spry Woods – and perhaps another form.
My shipping notice featured what must be a previous title, “In Old Hesket Woods,” which feels more appropriate to the subdued folktale vibe. This novel shows promise and I’ll certainly follow Bayat’s career, but something about it was a little too … quiet? provincial? to stick with me. Certain chapters, particularly the first, are strong stand-alones, but some of the rest are thin. Those with ties to Norwich may be keenest to read this. (New purchase – Awesomebooks.com with voucher)
The Salt King by Natasha Pulley
Jesuit priest Avelyn Brocken is recalled from the Vatican to Hreodwater in East Anglia to investigate miracles said to have taken place at the salt mine. His hometown is like its own country, with an ancient language and customs. Legends of the Salt King and the “salt light” emanating from the mine characterise it as a benevolent place, as several recent healings would seem to support. Miracles have been reported at other salt mines from Jordan to Russia, too. But then a Hreodwater visitor is turned into a pillar of salt. As researchers at the Dead Sea have also found, proximity to the salt destroys all electronic devices and potentially threatens human health in a way similar to radiation.
Pulley’s eighth novel blurs the lines between good and evil when it comes to ‘gods,’ ‘witches’ and ‘angels’. Supernatural events might be the physical incarnation of belief or the punishments of a capricious deity. There is quite complicated world-building around Hreodwater, which I’m not used to because I don’t read, for example, hard SF. The inclusion of other salt mine locations, even when they’re not developed into full side plots, might serve as further evidence of what’s going on but also dilutes the central story. Overall, then, the novel felt much longer than it needed to be at over 450 pages.
This was my first experience with Pulley, and I found her style to be similar to T. Kingfisher’s – hip, shrewd fantasy-meets-horror in which sarcasm and queerness (a flirtation between Avelyn and the abbey caretaker, Jericho) reign – but Pulley is less grating. There’s a jokey faux-academic tone to the footnotes, and I loved the sense of humour:
“Avelyn broke. ‘Ssh yourself. What kind of sociopath eats a peach during Mass anyway?’”
“Fabian, I mean this in the most brotherly possible way, but f*ck off before I shove you in the f*cking fen.”
“Where do I find new jeans in Hreodwater? … what would you put on the delivery instructions? Proceed past imaginary castle, mind the angry knights, try not to turn to salt for no reason”
While Pulley doesn’t always gets it right about belief – she admits in the Acknowledgements that she isn’t religious at all so had to interview a lot of people to try to understand faith – it’s heartening that she makes the attempt, and the clash of organised religion and folk religion here, as realised in the troubled character of Avelyn, is intriguing. I’d try another of this author’s (shorter) works; any recommendations for me? (Public library)
My most striking bit of Halloween-relevant reading this year came from an unexpected place: the chapter “Spirits and Demons” in the memoir Ordinary Light by Tracy K. Smith. Her very religious mother was wary about her children celebrating Halloween, though she was happy to provide autumnal snacks and games for her daughter’s kindergarten classroom. When it came to trick-or-treating, though, she subverted the holiday’s tropes by dressing Tracy in a ghost costume disconcertingly reminiscent of a KKK outfit – a reminder that the true horrors are out there in the real world.
Are you doing anything for Halloween? Read anything spooky lately?
#ShortStorySeptember, Meet #RIPXXI: Fremlin, M.R. James & Navarro
I can hardly believe it’s October; I still have a bunch of short stories to finish and review! I’m taking the opportunity to start on Readers Imbibing Peril with these three collections that crank up the suspense with their scenes of the unexplained.
Don’t Go to Sleep in the Dark by Celia Fremlin (1970)
(Faber reprint: 2024)
I wasn’t wild about Fremlin’s Uncle Paul, but these 13 stories were terrific. Nightmares sometimes become reality as children and women of a certain age face up to threats, whether concrete or imaginary. The twist endings can reassure or unsettle, but in either case they call into question the tenor of what’s gone before. Only three tales are in the first person, with the other 10 in an authoritative third person. The need to protect children is a recurring impulse, ageing is a frequent cause of angst, and there are a couple of instances of frightening bird imagery (a nod to du Maurier?). There are also tweaks of horror story tropes – the haunted house in “The Hated House” and “The Locked Room.” Visual and auditory clues ramp up the tension. I’ll highlight a couple of favourites: “The Quiet Game,” in which a mother’s mental illness has dangerous implications for her twins; and “The Baby-Sitter,” about a little girl who’s afraid of The Hen with Great Big Eyes and her child-minder, who’s lived out her own horrors as a European refugee. This one is a fine example of how Fremlin mixes the everyday with suggestions of the supernatural. (Little Free Library)
Ghost Stories of an Antiquary: A Graphic Collection of Short Stories by M.R. James, Volume I (2016)
(Adapted by Leah Moore and John Reppion)
(I reviewed Volume II in 2017.) Though all retold by the same duo, these four stories are each illustrated by a different artist. So although the setup and voice tends to be samey – a dignified man investigating strange happenings at a country house – the art style varies significantly While I didn’t care for the approach in the first two (“Canon Alberic’s Scrap-Book” – Marvel; “Lost Hearts” – Pixar), the others, “The Mezzotint” and “The Ash-tree,” made up for it. I liked the monochrome palette, gentlemen detecting vibe, and Wildean mark of a morphing image of the former. In the latter, a Gothic setting and a history of suppressing witchcraft pave the way for unnatural spectacles. James’s classic ghost stories have been hugely influential on the likes of Susan Hill. (I also wondered if Stephen King borrowed the girl in the bath from “Lost Hearts” for The Shining.) Still, my conclusion about the second volume stands for the whole project: the “problem with using the graphic form for … tales that center around nameless horror is that depicting [what is feared] saps it of its power.” 
With thanks to SelfMadeHero for the free copy of The Compendium (Volumes I and II) for review.
Blood Is Dripping onto the Courtyard by Elvira Navarro (2025; 2026)
[Translated from the Spanish by Christina MacSweeney]
My introduction to Navarro, a Spanish author, reminded me most of Agustina Bazterrica’s 19 Claws and a Black Bird. These nine stories are full of derelict buildings, outsider characters, and traces of the uncanny. Seven are in the third person and two in first. A nice touch: two stories are linked in that they feature Almudena, who is studying in Paris. “The Fear of the City” is, we realize, the story she wrote about femicide, as mentioned, fittingly, in “The City of Fear.” “Idiotic Love” is narrated by a trans woman with an anal fissure and conjures a seedy world of nightclubs and sex shops. This was the longest story and not a pleasant one. There were just three standouts for me. In “The Washing Machine,” which contains the title line, a couple’s appliance keeps filling with blood for no reason. “The Animal Collector” is a tough one for animal lovers because of all the injuries and deaths, but the idea of a highway maintenance man assembling a makeshift zoo for his roadside rescues is alluring. Eventually, he becomes overwhelmed and compassion turns into a burden. In “A Small Bunch of Violets,” Mari chooses a new ornament for her father’s grave during a heat wave, but the flowers keep being displaced. There were too many so-so stories, though.
With thanks to Two Lines Press and publicist Nicolette Praça for the proof copy for review.
Late Summer Novels (Bamford, Ellis, Hornak, King) & Poetry Collections for the Transition into Autumn (Hurst, McNish, Plath)
It’s been feeling autumnal for a few weeks now with the drizzle, chilly mornings and evenings, honking of geese overhead, and harvesting our last garden apples – though it remains warm and summer only officially ended on Monday. I’ve recently finished off a summer-titled trilogy and the second entry in a seasonal quartet. I’m also throwing in a couple fun novels I bought earlier in the year.
Before and after Tuesday’s autumn equinox, a few poetry collections have been my fitting companions for the start of a new season.
Idle Grounds by Krystelle Bamford (2025)
“The following is an account of an afternoon in June in which we sallied forth, and then, for the most part, back.” I was drawn in by the mock-heroic first-person plural voice of a gaggle of cousins at a New England family get-together. It’s 1989 and they’re here for one of the adults’ birthdays, but that’s of no concern to the kids, who are a world unto themselves. In the first chapter, three-year-old Abi goes missing and the rest set out on a quest to rescue her. The shed, the woods, a driveway full of cars, the river: every setting seems to offer adventure, but maybe also danger. And then the oldest boy cousin, Travis, vanishes too. “Intermezzo” chapters offer snippets of family lore – about their grandmother Beezy’s awful novel, The Lilac Swing, and so on – that don’t add much of interest to this meandering novella. To deliver on the promise of the narrative voice, Bamford needed to give her debut a little more: more intrigue, more pivotal scenes, more closeness to a few characters rather than surface descriptions of a bunch, maybe more pages to make something of the not-so-momentous family secrets. As it is, I had to agree with this tongue-in-cheek line on p. 136: “in our depleted state, we thought the very thought you’re thinking now, which is enough already.” (New purchase with voucher – Hungerford Bookshop) 
Book 3 of The Summerhouse Trilogy
The Fly in the Ointment by Alice Thomas Ellis (1989)
{BEWARE SPOILERS!}
Following The Clothes in the Wardrobe (1987) and The Skeleton in the Cupboard (1988), this novella revisits the run-up to Margaret and Syl’s wedding from Lili’s perspective. It’s the shortest of the three books and adds no new plot details or real character insight, but Lili’s voice is alluring all the same. She’s an incorrigible flirt, or perhaps what we would now call a love (not necessarily sex) addict: “Sometimes I felt I would disappear if I couldn’t see the person opposite falling in love with me. I just wouldn’t be there.” Lili is pivotal to the narrative because of her well-meaning interventions: first, she falsely portrays the coming union as blessed by creating a fake (tissue paper) bloom for the cactus in the summerhouse; then, in agreement with other characters such as Mrs Monro that there shouldn’t be a wedding after all, she decides to sabotage it by ensuring that she and Syl be caught in flagrante in the summerhouse. While this was an interesting project for Ellis to undertake, the first volume was by far my favourite and I didn’t think the second and third wholly necessary. (Secondhand – Regent Books, Wantage) 
So Good to See You by Francesca Hornak (2025)
Daniel, Rosie and Serge were good friends at Oxford but since their graduation in 2004 they’ve drifted into indifference and resentment. Daniel is a Hollywood star but still can’t forgive filmmaker Serge for stealing his idea for a biopic of a working-class lad. Serge is on a break from his relationship with Isla, a younger movie makeup artist with whom he has twins. Rosie regrets that her on-again, off-again relationship with Serge meant she wasted prime years. In August 2019, they’re all brought together for Serge’s cousin Caspar’s big gay wedding in Provence. The Campbell cousins come from inherited wealth, but no one knows Serge’s production company is heavily in debt. As best man and “best woman,” Serge and Rosie have to write a joint speech; Daniel has to hide his dependency on alcohol and drugs.
This is a light, Taylor Jenkins Reid-esque soap opera that I swallowed in big gulps. I’d enjoyed Hornak’s Christmas-set debut, Seven Days of Us (2017), but when I looked back at it I realised how identikit the two are: set mostly over a matter of days, with each chapter marked by a precise place and time stamp. I guess she hit on a winning formula and decided to repeat it, but I was disappointed to notice the similarity. In this case, zooming in slows the action and makes the book feel overlong, though it’s perceptive about class, privilege, disappointment, the longing for parenthood, and loyalty among family and friends. (Her previous novel now seems almost prescient with its depiction of a Christmas in quarantine! Perhaps I’ll reread it.) (New purchase with voucher – Hungerford Bookshop)
Apt Pupil by Stephen King (1982)
(Novella published in Different Seasons under the heading “Summer of Corruption”)
{BEWARE SPOILERS!}
Thirteen-year-old Todd Bowden becomes obsessed with his elderly neighbour, whom he has identified as German concentration camp officer Kurt Dussander, in the summer of 1974. His parents think that he goes over to read to “Mr. Denker,” but in fact he’s extorting sordid war stories out of the old man. When Todd’s grades nosedive, Dussander agrees to impersonate his grandfather at a conference with the school counsellor so his parents remain oblivious. Now each has dirt on the other; blackmail goes both ways. The book suggests Dussander’s ongoing sadism sparks something inexorable in the young man, and both engage in further senseless carnage. I wasn’t sure if it was respectful of King to treat the Holocaust like a contagious sin. As Todd’s (real) grandfather says, “Sometimes the past don’t rest so easy. Why else do people study history?” I don’t think an editor would have let the story stand today. This is not as full-on horror as others I’ve read by King (Misery and Pet Sematary), but still gruesome and – for an animal lover like me – Dussander’s torture of cats and dogs was harder to read about than the murders of unhoused people. A neat connection back to Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption, which I read back in the spring: Dussander mentions that “The banker who bought [the stocks] for me went to jail for murdering his wife a year” later in Maine. (Little Free Library)
Three on a Theme: Autumnal Poetry
Keats described autumn as the season of “mellow fruitfulness,” as I was reminded by Kate Mosse’s Autumn. Fruit and feminism are themes that link these three collections. All:
The Fox’s Wedding by Rebecca Hurst (2022)
I’ve read Hurst’s debut full-length collection, The Iron Bridge, and jumped at the chance to catch up on her previous chapbook. Its hint of fairy tale menace feels appropriate for early spooky season. A witch turns into a hare and flees in “Familiar.” The girl who will win the hand of “The Frog Prince” spends her evenings “squashing worms and slugs and snails beneath / the crêpe soles of her black school shoes.” Needlecraft recurs: “Once there was a child/ who woke alone in the forest. … S/he took the path of needles / to ask needle-sharp questions.” There are folktale rhythms to “Brothers,” which also mentions gingerbread men. The woods morph with the advance of the year (“let the seasons pleat / folding one year to the next”) and hide creatures real and imagined. “Now it is Michaelmas: the land sun-warm, / fields shorn, blackberries ripe to bursting.” The atmosphere of this pamphlet – defiant, magical, mischievous – casts a spell. (New purchase from The Emma Press)
Plum by Hollie McNish (2017)
A late tree-shaped poem captures a treasured ritual with her daughter. But if I tell you that “plum” is also the last in a long string of euphemisms for female genitalia in “Voldemort,” that will give a better sense of McNish’s tone, which is often cheeky and snarky. She includes poems she wrote as a child and teenager but also remembers her adolescence from adulthood, pinpointing moments of peer pressure and misogyny that she experienced. She wishes she and her friends had been less obsessed with what boys thought of them and hopes to teach her daughter to stand firm in her own identity. McNish has local roots and is known for her conversational memoirs and her spoken word poetry. Like Harry Baker, Jay Bernard and Kae Tempest’s works, it’s probably not best encountered in print. In performance, fairly simple and repetitive phrasing can come to life. (Secondhand – Library book sale)
I spend the summer months watching like a hawk for when wild and waste-ground plums ripen and fall so I can scurry around gathering them to eat or freeze for autumn and winter desserts. Our cherry plum tree produced its first fruits this year, too (below).
Crossing the Water by Sylvia Plath (1971)
I got less out of this posthumous collection than I did from Ariel and Winter Trees, but there are still striking turns of phrase: “The future is a grey seagull / Tattling in its cat-voice of departure, departure” (from “A Life”) and “At our feet, the weed-moustachioed sea / Exhibits its glaucous silks” (from “Whitsun”). Canada, age, sleep, surgery: the imagery feels a little all over the place. The stand-out poems for me were “Small Hours,” in which marble statues metaphorically watch over the speaker’s troubled insomnia, and “Mirror,” which reflects the unstoppable advance of age and contrasts true self with appearances. Most redolent of autumn were a poem about pheasant hunting and “Blackberrying”:
Nobody in the lane, and nothing, nothing but blackberries,
Blackberries on either side, …
A blackberry alley, going down in hooks, and a sea
Somewhere at the end of it, heaving. Blackberries
Big as the ball of my thumb
The Devon lanes aren’t so empty these days, I can attest! A line from “Last Words” ties in perfectly and is a good resolution for us all: “I should sugar and preserve my days like fruit!” (University library)
I started my preserving late and will not do as much as I have in other years. So far I’ve made apple and tomato chutney and set some rosehip cordial steeping. This afternoon I’m going to attempt rosehip curd – we found a jar of “hagebutten” in a Berlin supermarket this time last year and it was so delicious that we’re going to try to recreate it, though it requires laborious deseeding and mincing plus two boiling stages. More Vitamin C than orange juice, apparently!
Rosehips ready for preserving!
Summer Reads, Part I: Buti, Ellis, C. Foster (Reread), Itami, Thomson
The less said about the summer of 2026, the better. It feels like the heat wave will never end. We’ve had 4 mm of rain the whole month. Drought imperils so much. But it’s not right to complain when wildfires rage not so far away. One glance at the news headlines and there’s no avoiding the signs of climate breakdown everywhere. I can’t bear it. I just keep reading.
Year of the Drought by Roland Buti (2015; 2017)
[Translated from French by Charlotte Mandell]
How exhausting was that summer of 1976, always beating down on our heads!
This Swiss novella takes place during the infamous European heat wave that people still talk about half a century later. It’s a perfect febrile setting for 13-year-old Gus’s coming-of-age, which includes a sexual awakening and the dawning realisation that his parents aren’t perfect; that in fact his family is falling apart. The Sutters’ operations embody the move from family smallholding to an industrial model. They keep a small number of cattle but are also experimenting with large-scale henhouses holding thousands of birds. In contrast with that vast flock, about whose welfare the characters seem indifferent, is an injured white dove that Gus finds and keeps as a pet. (A wise choice by Buti: it’s easier to feel compassion for an individual, such as the dove or the old farm horse, Bagatelle, than for a faceless mass.) Helping Gus and his father on the farm is distant cousin Rudy, who has Down’s syndrome; disrupting their routines is Cécile, Gus’s mother’s friend, who has come to stay with them.
Because of the drought, our minds were full of dreams of coolness and moisture
Dreams of rain, dreams of love, dreams of preserving some mythical family happiness that maybe never existed. Like the weather, everything goes wrong – in tragic ways. It’s all so awful I recoiled. Buti jumps ahead several decades to offer a longer view of the land, but I couldn’t ignore how casually the teenage Gus adopted his father’s violent, misogynistic ways. None of what happens bodes well for the future. The one laugh I got out of the experience was the charity shop accidentally labelling the book “Romance fiction.” (Secondhand – BHF, Newbury)
Book 1 of The Summerhouse Trilogy
The Clothes in the Wardrobe by Alice Thomas Ellis (1987)
I hadn’t had great luck with Ellis, fiction and nonfiction, before, but I’m so glad I was tempted by this omnibus edition and tried her again. This melancholy, introspective novella was right up my street. Margaret’s yearning for her Egyptian upbringing isn’t the only reason I reached for Moon Tiger as a readalike; Ellis’s tone reminded me of Barbara Comyns and Penelope Lively for its mix of cynicism and nostalgia. Margaret is soon to marry Sylvester, though she doesn’t love him at all and he’s closer to her mother’s age as well as a known womanizer. Perhaps the engagement was her mother’s idea more than her own? The title is an apt symbol for living to someone else’s expectations: “my life fitted me as ill as a garment designed for somebody else,” Margaret thinks. It’s no coincidence that she’s to be married in her mother’s old wedding dress. There are also sartorial metaphors around memory (“Did the elderly have minds like old wardrobes stuffed to overflowing…”) and resistance to ageing. I marked out so many shrewd observations and witty conversations. I empathized with Margaret’s feeling of being trapped in a life she hasn’t chosen.
It seems like one of those books where nothing will happen, but there’s actually a surprise ending that looks set to move Margaret onto a different track. As I understand it, the other two volumes repeat the weeks leading up to the wedding from other perspectives: Margaret’s staid mother-in-law-to-be; and her mother’s bohemian friend Lili, who was her bridesmaid back in Egypt and arrives in time to shake things up. I love that premise. The omnibus cover seems random, but the question of whether the cactus in the summerhouse will flower as good luck for the wedding becomes an important plot point. I’ll jump right into Book 2. (Secondhand – Regent Books, Wantage)
The Screaming Sky by Charles Foster (2021)
The only thing that has redeemed these dry, scorching days is the swifts screeching across the sky. How can it be that I was once unaware of them? How is it possible for people not to look up for these noisy acrobats whenever they’re outdoors? Somehow, I was oblivious until maybe 10–15 years ago. Now, I always have at least one eye on the sky during these crucial few months. And although this year swifts have been with me since early April (first in Portugal and then in our neighbourhood), I’m already dreading their departure for Africa in a few weeks. They’re still here! I trill to myself each morning. But soon that won’t be true. And with populations in freefall, there may come a day when they don’t return to the UK at all.
Charles Foster is a kindred spirit who sets similar emotional store by the presence or absence of the common swift (Apus apus). I appreciated this when I first read it five years ago (my review), but all the more so now. The monograph takes us through one year with swifts. In the summer, he needs travel no further than his own street in Oxford, but the rest of the time he has to chase them down in continental Europe and central and southern Africa. It’s an old-fashioned quest, a romantic pursuit, a hopeless attempt to keep hold of creatures as fast and elusive as the wind. Foster salts his narrative with all the salient facts but acknowledges that, for all we claim to know about them, these birds retain an essential magic and mystery. “Their power, freedom and joy are the way that everything really is – though we don’t usually see it. It is just that when the swifts scream through the sky, you can’t miss it. That’s how everything, all the time, is meant to be.” (Review copy from Little Toller Books)
My original rating:
My rating now: 
Bonus content:
From Robert Macfarlane’s The Book of Birds (illus. Jackie Morris):
From the Spell Songs album Let the Light In: “Swifts”
& My current earworm, also featuring Kris Drever: a more general reassurance – or at least philosophical acceptance – that change is the one constant in life, in perfect pop song form (“Change”)
And from Ugandan poet Nick Makoha’s The New Carthaginians: “in the first part of the night, I saw the coastal villages, men arguing / about the price of oil and swifts darting into shadows.” (from “Codex© of Birds”)
Kakigori Summer by Emily Itami (2025)
Itami was shortlisted for a Costa Award for her enjoyable 2021 debut, Fault Lines. Kakigori is a flavoured shaved-ice dessert and it’s a great choice of title for this bittersweet – but mostly sweet – story of three sisters raised between Tokyo and London who reunite in Japan to spend a summer together with their prickly great-grandmother, Obaachan, who’s nearing 100. Narration alternates between Rei, the oldest, who has a high-flying finance job and keeps everyone in line; Kiki, who’s a single mother and works in a care home for the elderly; and Ai, a flighty pop star now in disgrace for her affair with a married man. Although there is much joy in their banter, little Hikaru’s antics, and the pursuit of the finest culinary treats, a shadow over it all is their mother’s unexplained death. She went for a swim one day when they were girls and never came back, nor was a body ever found; they have to suspect suicide. (“Well, that’s that, then. Nothing will be all right ever again.”) This easy-reading novel affirms the goodness of life despite the reality of death. Its typically Japanese feasts and funerary rites brought to mind Bryan Washington’s similarly well-balanced Memorial. My only note would be that I’m not sure the voices were distinctive enough to warrant three first-person narrators; third person rotating would probably have done the job. (Public library)
Saltwater: A Midsummer Ghost Story by Elaine Thomson (2026)
“The dead are closer than we think.”
I hadn’t heard of the Scottish island of Stroma, so assumed it was made up. In fact, it’s real, lying between Orkney and the north coast of Caithness on mainland Scotland, but uninhabited as of 1962. Tom Torrance travels by train and boat from Edinburgh a few days before midsummer to oversee the last steps in the construction of the island’s lighthouse and meet with Mr Stevenson (of the famous lighthouse-building clan, which included novelist Robert Louis Stevenson). With him is his brother Jamie; he’s not of much practical help, but they cling to each other because they lost their mother to tuberculosis a week ago. The travelling minister Tom meets on the train gives him a rowan-wood amulet and cautions him that midsummer is a liminal time when the spirit world is close at hand. Tom doesn’t heed the warning. He arrives to find a disaster-prone construction project that has entailed serious injuries and broken machinery. Flora Christie and her grandmother, Thrawn Jean, are local women with healing powers who are treated with suspicion: women, especially those with red hair, are considered bad luck around boats. The men want to seal a “witch bottle” into the wall for good luck. He dismisses their superstitions but at the same time keeps seeing hallucinations of the dead in the waves and on the in-construction edifice. Is it grief, Flora’s special whisky, or a real taste of the supernatural?
This was highly reminiscent of Michelle Paver’s work. The typical Victorian-pastiche ghost story bores me because it’s always just the same: the narrator is a dignified gentleman who can’t possibly be seeing such things, yet documents them and his own horror with great precision. Thomson set herself an interesting challenge, writing a quartet of Scottish ghost stories set at turning points of the year. (This is the second, after Hawthorn.) I probably won’t try the others unless my library acquires them. (Public library)
May Releases by Siri Hustvedt, Will Maclean & More
This month’s overarching theme is creepy and/or haunted houses! My main reviews are of a collage-style bereavement memoir and a slice of English horror. I also excerpt my reviews of four more May releases read in advance for Shelf Awareness, including one that’s in the running for my Book of the Year.
Ghost Stories by Siri Hustvedt
Paul Auster died of non-small cell lung cancer on April 30, 2024. His widow, Siri Hustvedt, wears his old clothes and still occasionally smells his cigar smoke in their Brooklyn home. “I’m living in a haunted house,” she writes, one “inhabited by a ghost Paul and I made together, a ‘we’ that doesn’t exist anymore.” This isn’t a straightforward bereavement memoir recounting the relationship followed by the loved one’s decline and death. Instead, it moves back and forth between past and present and incorporates various documents. There are glimpses of her state of mind as she keeps up with routines to get through the days but still experiences life as unreal and outside of time.
One section reprints 12 e-mail updates she sent to friends and family during Paul’s illness. She weaves through fragments of his shocking family history (familiar from The Invention of Solitude), certain events that have been memorialized in his books (such as the car accident he wrote about in Winter Journal), and brief tales of his work and its reception. There’s also Paul’s incomplete series of letters to his newborn grandson, Miles, in which he tells the boy the stories he thinks he should know about his ancestors. A notable one was about 9/11, which happened to be the day their daughter Sophie started at a new high school; she passed under the World Trade Center on the subway half an hour before the first attack.
For those of us who have read both Auster and Hustvedt, it’s particularly interesting to read about how their work intersects. “We both liked the idea of our fictional worlds kissing, as it were,” she notes. She describes their connection as “intellectual-erotic” and predicts that, given another 100 years together, they would have merged into one person. Their influence on each other’s work was mutual, she insists, rather than one-sided from Paul to her as misogynistic detractors have assumed. She’s always been more the intellectual anyway, with a literature PhD and amateur interests in neurology and philosophy; and he ‘borrowed’ her character Iris Vegan (from The Blindfold) for one of his later novels, Leviathan.
The book grows increasingly political towards its close. Paul didn’t live to see “45” re-elected as 47. Hustvedt decries the rise of anti-intellectualism and, at Paul’s memorial service nearly 10 months after his death, quoted her father’s prescient words: “when fascism comes to America, they’ll call it Americanism.” It doesn’t seem like alarmism to ask what the current regime in the US and elsewhere portends for writers committed to humanism, nuance, and more or less overt voicing of outrage (as in one of Paul’s late books, a short text accompanying his son-in-law’s photographic series on gun violence in America).
This whetted my appetite to read more by Auster and fulfils her stated goal “to bring something of the man back on the page.” I can thoroughly recommend it to fans of either or both authors, as well as those interested in grief stories and the current literary scene. (Read via Edelweiss)
Solace House by Will Maclean
I hadn’t heard of Maclean’s first novel, The Apparition Phase, which was on the McKitterick Prize shortlist (before my involvement with the Prize), but I was drawn to the descriptions of his second. The cover puff from Nicholas Binge – “The Secret History meets The Haunting of Hill House” – can’t be topped, and the promotional materials’ references to Piranesi and Possession are equally accurate. In the summer of 1993, Alex Lane is 19, broke and wondering what to do with himself. He seems to be the only student left at The Ridge. Except for that pale young man he’s seen screaming at a window opposite his room…
The Student Welfare Office offers him a job on a team clearing out two Victorian properties the university has acquired or is hoping to acquire. One is Marshlands, a former mental hospital, while Solace House was the private residence of the Flaynes, the last of whom recently died at age 101. Alex finds “a lifeboat of easy camaraderie” with his seven co-workers: Clive, a loud, confident stoner; Malcolm, who’s beautiful and gay; Helen, who’s super-religious; Ruth, a Goth; Leo, a mystical researcher; Adam, a weird (traumatized rich kid; and Ella, who’s clever and alluring. But none of them is prepared for what they find at Solace House. Edwin Flayne was a hoarder and the rooms are so full that they can’t move. One is completely covered in mirrors; another has creepy effigies around a table; the hall is plastered with strange paintings; and a series of ledgers with the ravings of a madman. Alex and Ella save from the burn pile one that contains an epic poem of utopian visions and musings on the disappearance of Flayne’s mother.
Flayne’s interest in the esoteric is only matched by Leo’s; add on some magic mushrooms and it’s a heady combination of the surreal as the team explores a cave on the property that the Flaynes considered a Thin Place. While high, Leo issues what seems to be a prophecy of the order in which they’ll all die. All along, we’re kept wondering how Alex’s parents both died on “The Last Day” at the hands of “The Annihilator.” He regurgitates fictional orphan plots to try to get Ella off his case, but she (and we) know he’s holding something back.
Although I wearied of the pastiche poetry that heads each chapter and at some point stopped reading it, it does have ultimate significance. (And bully to Maclean for adding “all written by me, rather than AI, before anyone asks” to his Acknowledgements.) Midway through, I was thinking to myself this should have been in the third person to legitimize the horror, as it can otherwise shade into silliness. Part IV jumps ahead in time and subverts what’s gone before, making Alex question not just the last four years of his life but the entire course of it. And now I knew why it had to be in the first person, so reliant is it on individual experience. Time, identity and memory all come into question.
At first I was disappointed, thinking that with this section Maclean had undermined the eerie power of what went before, but there’s another switchback still to come. The book is a little overlong at just under 500 pages, and sags a bit in the final 100, but it kept surprising me and it comes to a satisfying conclusion. I also got the sense of an author having fun with the 1990s nostalgia and student behaviour. I would certainly seek out his debut.
With thanks to Atlantic Books for the free copy for review.
Reviewed for Shelf Awareness:
Memory House by Elaine Kraf: In this posthumous fifth novel, a novelist enters a commune for failed artists. Magic realism and metafiction coalesce in another of this unsung genius’ typically weird explorations of memory, creativity, and sexuality. It all appears to add up to a metaphorical journey, with a symbolic death and rebirth for those re-entering Society.
Mother Tongue by Sara Nović: Nović’s fourth book is a defiant memoir of parenthood achieved in spite of the troubled histories of deaf education, religious indoctrination, and international adoption. This is a fierce defense of deafness as a culture rather than a disability to be eradicated, and a beautiful exploration of the legacies of language and love.
Wellwater by Karen Solie: The Canadian poet Karen Solie’s intricate sixth collection (which won the T. S. Eliot Prize), gilds the natural and human worlds with religious imagery and an environmentalist conscience. The work toggles between the material and the abstract; quotidian experiences fuel meditations on concepts such as intuition, kindness, and fate.
John of John by Douglas Stuart: In Douglas Stuart’s superb third novel set on the Isle of Harris (Outer Hebrides), a young man seeks to reconcile his sexuality and artistic goals with his family’s expectations and devout upbringing. Intriguing in its particularities but timeless in wisdom, it offers hope that relinquishing shame creates freedom to be true to oneself. (I also got to interview Douglas Stuart! This is one of my top three books of 2026 so far, along with Brawler and Whistler – forthcoming in June.)
R.I.P. Reads, Part II: Feito, King, Link, Paver & Taylor
Soon it’ll be all novellas, all the time around here. But first I have a few more October reads to review.
A belated Happy Halloween! As a kid in the U.S. suburbs, I loved Halloween. It was such fun planning costumes – pumpkin, cowgirl and picnic table are a few memorable ones that I remember thanks to photographs – and my hoard of candy would last me for months. But these days, I tend to be pretty grumpy about the holiday. It never used to be a thing in the UK, but it has been creeping in year on year. I don’t mind a creatively carved jack o’ lantern, tasteful decoration or clever homemade costume. What does get my goat is plastic tat, gratuitous gore and the dozens of sodden sweets and wrappers littering the streets after last night’s rain and wind.
Anyway, we enjoyed the stormy evening because we spent it at friends’ having delicious autumnal lasagne and parkin, playing instruments and board games and eavesdropping on the trick-or-treaters. I had to laugh when J said “Take a couple” and one little girl replied, “That’s okay, I don’t really like sweeties.” These friends were keeping some ancient traditions alive: carving a turnip, wearing one’s clothes inside out and walking between two fires to ward off fairies. They also put potatoes in the treats bowl, which definitely confused the kids. (One did take a spud!)
I really leaned into the Readers Imbibing Peril reading this year. I had a somewhat lacklustre first batch, but these five were great!
Victorian Psycho by Virginia Feito (2025)
This was among my Most Anticipated titles of the year – for the bonkers blurb but also because of how much I’d enjoyed Feito’s debut, Mrs. March. Both novels go deep with mentally disturbed protagonists. The first channeled Patricia Highsmith with its stylish psychological suspense; here we have a full-on blend of slasher horror and sadistic humour, wrapped up in a Victorian pastiche. Winifred Notty (naughty girl indeed) is the new governess at Ensor House on the Yorkshire moors. She couldn’t care less about her charges, Andrew and Drusilla. No, she’s here to exact revenge on the master of the house, Mr. Pounds. But not before she’s dispatched many a random servant and baby. “Bodies pile up in the attic.” Her brutal fantasies are so realistic that at times it’s difficult to separate them from what she actually carries out. Miss Notty is also a highly sexual being whose fixations could certainly be interpreted in Freudian ways. Feito spins a traumatic backstory for her antiheroine but doesn’t make it any excuse for her gleeful reign of terror. It’s delicious fun, especially for a Victorianist, but don’t attempt if you’re squeamish. (Read via NetGalley)
Misery by Stephen King (1987)
All these years I’d had two 1989–1990 films conflated: Misery and My Left Foot. I’ve not seen either but as an impressionable young’un I made a mental mash-up of the posters’ stills into a film featuring Daniel Day-Lewis as a paralyzed writer and Kathy Bates as a madwoman wielding an axe. (Turns out the left foot is relevant!)
Paul Sheldon wakes in a fog of pain, his legs shattered from a one-car accident on a snowy Colorado backroad. He’s famous for his historical potboilers about Misery Chastain but, like Arthur Conan Doyle with Sherlock Holmes, has killed off his most beloved character. Except now he’s in the home of Annie Wilkes, his rescuer and biggest fan, and she demands he resurrect Misery. Annie is a former nurse who left the profession after numerous suspicious deaths on her watch. She keeps Paul dependent on her – and on Novril, a fictional opiate. In a case of ‘Scheherazade complex’, he’ll be her prisoner until he’s completed a sequel that’s to her satisfaction. Compared to Pet Sematary, the only other King novel I’ve read, this was slow to draw me in because of the repetitive scenes in a claustrophobic setting, and I wearied of the excerpts from Paul’s manuscript. But eventually I was riveted, desperate to know how Paul was going to get out of this predicament and what the final showdown could be. Extremes of pain and obsession make this an intense study of the psychology of a wretched pair. (Public library)
Pretty Monsters by Kelly Link (2008)
This is a reissue edition geared towards young adults. All but one of the 10 stories were originally published in literary magazines or anthologies. The stories are long, some approaching novella length, and took me quite a while to read. I got through the first three and will save the rest for next year. In “The Wrong Grave,” a teen decides to dig up his dead girlfriend’s casket to reclaim the poems he rashly buried with her last year – as did Dante Gabriel Rossetti, which Link makes a point of mentioning. A terrific blend of spookiness and comedy ensues.
“The Wizards of Perfil” and the title story are 50-some and 60-some pages, respectively, which allows a lot of space for intriguing weirdness and side plots. In the former, Onion’s cousin Halsa is purchased to be a servant to a wizard. The cousins both have the gift of foresight but can’t get the wizards to take them seriously when they beg that something to be done to prevent human disasters. It’s a brilliant allegory of the danger of waiting for an external force – God, the government, whatever – to solve everything versus getting on with it yourself. In the title story, a group of teens are obsessed with a mysterious Doctor Who-esque television show called The Library, which colours all their interactions. The main character Jeremy’s father is an eccentric sci-fi novelist named Gordon Strangle Mars who has written his son into his latest plot in a disturbing way. Jeremy recently inherited a gas station and phone box in Las Vegas and occasionally calls the phone box to air his grievances and solicit supernatural aid. My only other experience of Link was a standalone story I was once sent for review, “The Summer People,” which I didn’t get on with, so I was surprised to encounter such top-notch fantasy/horror tales. (Little Free Library)
Rainforest by Michelle Paver (2025)
I’d read all three of Paver’s previous horror novels for adults (Thin Air, Dark Matter and Wakenhyrst) and found them easy, atmospheric reading but not nearly as scary as billed. This is her best yet. Set in 1973 on an expedition to Mexico, it has as its unreliable narrator Dr. Simon Corbett, an English entomologist. Adding to the findings of the archaeological dig he’s accompanying, he’ll be hunting for mantids (praying mantises, stick insects and the like) by fogging sacred trees with pesticides. He also experiments with taking a hallucinogenic plant extract used by the Indigenous shamans, hoping to be reunited with his lost love, Penelope.
We know that Corbett’s employment is tenuous and that he’s seeing a therapist. Paver authentically reproduces the casual racism and sexism of the time and seeds little hints that this protagonist may not be telling the whole truth about his relationship with Penelope. The long sequence where he’s lost in the jungle is fantastic. Corbett seems fated to repeat ancient masochistic rites, as if in penance for what he’s done wrong. My husband is an entomologist, so I was interested to read about period collecting practices. The novelty of the setting is a bonus to this high-quality psychological thriller and ghost story. (Public library)
Bone Broth by Alex Taylor (2025)
Ash is a trans man who starts working at a hole-in-the-wall ramen restaurant underneath a London railway arch. All he wants is to “pay for hormones, pay rent, [and] make enough to take a cutie on a date.” Bug’s Bones is run by an irascible elderly proprietor but staffed by a young multicultural bunch: Sock, Blue, Honey and Creamy. They quickly show Ash the ropes and within a month he’s turning out perfect bowls. He’s creeped out by the restaurant’s trademark bone broth, though, with its reminders of creatures turning into food. At the end of a drunken staff party, they find Bug lying dead and have to figure out what to do about it.
This storyline is in purple, whereas the alternating sequences of flashbacks are in a fleshy pinkish-red. As the two finally meet and meld, we see Ash trying to imitate the masculinity he sees on display while he waits for the surface to match what’s inside. I didn’t love the drawing style – though the full-page tableaux are a lot better than the high-school-sketchbook small panes – so that was an issue for me throughout, but this was an interesting, ghoulish take on the transmasc experience. Taylor won a First Graphic Novel Award.
With thanks to SelfMadeHero for the free copy for review.
And one DNF: Saltwash by Andrew Michael Hurley. (I was warned!) It had no menace or momentum at all…
Any stand-out creepy reading for you this year?
R.I.P. Reads, Part I: Apostolides, Dahl, Harkness, Kingfisher & Kohda
Ghosts, witches, vampires, creepy underground things: It can only be Readers Imbibing Peril time of year! Here’s my first five reviews.
The Homecoming by Zoë Apostolides (2025)
This debut novel dropped through my door as a total surprise: not only was it unsolicited, but I’d not heard about it. In this modern take on the traditional haunted house story, Ellen is a ghostwriter sent from London to Elver House, Northumberland, to work on the memoirs of its octogenarian owner, Catherine Carey. Ellen will stay in the remote manor house for a week and record 20 hours of audio interviews – enough to flesh out an autobiography. Miss Carey isn’t a forthcoming subject, but Ellen manages to learn that her father drowned in the nearby brook and that all Miss Carey did afterwards was meant to please her grieving mother and the strictures of the time. But as strange happenings in the house interfere with her task, Ellen begins to doubt she’ll come away with usable material. I was reminded of The Woman in Black, The Thirteenth Tale, and especially Wakenhyrst what with the local eel legends. The subplot about Ellen drifting apart from her best friend, a new mother, felt unnecessary, though I suppose was intended to bolster the main theme of women’s roles. There’s a twist that more seasoned readers of Gothic fiction and ghost stories might see coming. While I found this very readable and perfectly capably written, I didn’t get a sense of where the author hopes to fit in the literary market; she’s previously published a true crime narrative. Full disclosure: I once collaborated with Zoë on a Stylist assignment.
With thanks to Salt Publishing for the proof copy for review.
The Witches by Roald Dahl (1983)
I’m sure I read all of Dahl’s major works when I was a child, though I had no specific memory of this one. After his parents’ death in a car accident, a boy lives in his family home in England with his Norwegian grandmother. She tells him stories from Norway and schools him in how to recognize and avoid witches. They wear wigs and special shoes to hide their baldness and square feet, and with their wide nostrils they sniff out children to turn them into hated creatures like slugs. When Grandmamma falls ill with pneumonia, she and the boy travel to a Bournemouth hotel for her recovery only to stumble upon a convention of witches under the guise of the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children. The Grand High Witch (Anjelica Huston, if you know the movie) has a new concoction that will transform children into mice at enough of a delay to occur the following morning at school. It’s up to the boy and his grandmother to save the day. I really enjoyed this caper, which I interpreted as being – like Tove Jansson’s The Summer Book – about imagination and making the most of one’s time with grandparents. But in the back of my mind was Jen Campbell’s objection to the stereotypical equating of disfigurement with villainy. The Grand High Witch also speaks with a heavy German accent. It would be understandable to dismiss this as dated and clichéd, but I still found it worthwhile. It also fit into my project to read books from my birth year. (Free from a neighbour) 
The Black Bird Oracle by Deborah Harkness (2024)
Somehow I’ve read this entire series even though none of the subsequent books lived up to A Discovery of Witches. What I loved about that first novel was how the author drew on her knowledge of the history of science to create a believable backdrop for a story of witches, vampires and other supernatural beings that took place largely in Oxford and its medieval libraries. Each sequel has elaborated further adventures for Diana Bishop, a witch; her vampire husband, Matthew de Clermont; and their family members and other hangers-on. Their twins, especially Becca, have inherited some of Diana’s power. I read the first half of this last year and finally skimmed to the end last week, so I haven’t retained much. Diana is summoned to the ancestral seat of the Bishops in Massachusetts and finds herself part of a community of gossipy, catty witches. (Dahl was right, they’re everywhere!) She has some fun, folksy interactions but things soon get more serious as she girds herself for a showdown with the darker implications of her gift. Overall, this didn’t add much to the ongoing narrative and the love scenes veered too close to romantasy for my liking. (Public library)
What Stalks the Deep by T. Kingfisher [Ursula Vernon] (2025)
The third in the “Sworn Soldier” series, after What Moves the Dead and What Feasts at Night. Alex Easton is a witty, gender-nonconforming narrator, which is why I persist with these novellas even though I’m underwhelmed by the plots. Denton, the American doctor friend from the first book, begs Easton to come to West Virginia: his cousin Oscar has gone missing in a mine after sending a series of alarming letters about a red light he saw in the depths. Easton and their right-hand man, Angus, soon encounter claustrophobia-inducing cave systems, various kinds of bad air and siphonophore-like marine creatures that can assemble to imitate other beings. (Why aren’t these on the cover, huh?!) In other intriguing matters, Denton seems to have something going on with his friend John Ingold, an Indigenous scientist. Though, as Easton frequently reminds themself, that’s none of our business. There are some great set-pieces and funny, if anachronistic, asides (on learning how to flick a lighter just right: “I used to practice it for hours as a teenager, in hopes of impressing girls. Look, girls were more easily impressed in those days. Shut up.”) But my feeling with all three books is that they’re over before they’ve barely begun, and they never deliver the expected horror. Smart-ass, queer fantasy/horror: these will be some people’s perfect books, just not mine. If you’re intrigued, do at least try the first one, which riffs on Poe. (Read via Edelweiss)
Woman, Eating by Claire Kohda (2022)
A very different sort of vampire novel. Twenty-three-year-old Lydia is half Japanese and half Malaysian; half human and half vampire. She’s trying to follow in her late father’s footsteps as an artist through an internship at a Battersea gallery, which comes with studio space where she’ll sleep to save money. But she can only drink blood like her mother, who turned her when she was a baby. Mostly she subsists on pig blood – which she can order dried if she can’t buy it fresh from a butcher – though, in one disturbing sequence, she brings home a duck carcass. When she falls for Ben, one of her studio-mates, she imagines what it would be like to be fully human: to make art together, to explore Asian cuisine, to bond over losing their mothers (his is dying of cancer; hers is in a care home with violence-tinged dementia). But Ben is already seeing someone, the internship is predictably dull, and a first attempt at consuming regular food goes badly wrong. There are a lot of promising threads in this debut. It’s fascinating how Lydia can intuit a creature’s whole life story by drinking their blood. She becomes obsessed with the Baba Yaga folk tale (and also mentions Malay vampire legends) and there’s a neat little bit of #MeToo revenge. But overall, it’s half-baked. Really, it’s just a disaster-woman book in disguise. The way Lydia’s identity determines her attitudes towards food and sex feels like a symbol of body dysmorphia. I’ll look out to see if Kohda does something more distinctive in future. (Secondhand – Awesomebooks.com)
More coming up on Halloween (thankfully, including books I liked better on average)!
20 Books of Summer, 6–7: Helen Dunmore and Stephen King
At least, I managed a pretty terrific pair, and completed half of my intended 4-in-a-row (the second row) on the Bingo card.
(Book featuring ice cream or summer foods)
Ice Cream by Helen Dunmore (2000)
These 18 pieces are quite varied: a few have historical settings, two are written in the second person, and several return to the life of Ulli (a recurring character from Love of Fat Men), a Finnish teenager who faces an unexpected pregnancy. Even the slight-seeming ones are satisfying slices of fiction. The title story and its follow-up, “Be Vigilant, Rejoice, Eat Plenty” advocate sensual indulgence, which I guess is the reason for the cover image – which I couldn’t decide whether to hide or flaunt as I was reading it in public.
Often, there is a hint of menace, whether the topic is salmon fishing, raspberry picking or the history of a lost ring. “The Clear and Rolling Water” has the atmosphere of a Scottish folk ballad, which made it perfect reading for our recent holiday to Scotland. “Leonardo, Michelangelo, SuperStork” and “Mason’s Mini-break” stand out for their dystopian and magic realist touches, respectively. In the former, couples are only allowed to conceive via state- sanctioned services; in the latter, an arrogant Booker Prize-winning author is patronizing when he meets a would-be writer while on holiday in Yorkshire.
Two of my favourites were “The Lighthouse Keeper’s Wife” and “Swimming into the Millennium,” which might have been written by Helen Simpson. All are of a high standard, and though they don’t fit together per se and mostly won’t stay with me, I really do rate Dunmore as a short story writer. (Secondhand – Community Furniture Project, Newbury) 
(Book from a genre you rarely read)
Pet Sematary by Stephen King (1983)
I’d only ever read King’s On Writing and worried I wouldn’t be able to handle his fiction. I could never watch a horror film, but somehow the same content was okay in print. For half the length or more, it’s more of a mildly dread-laced, John Irving-esque novel about how we deal with the reality of death. Dr. Louis Creed and his family – wife Rachel, five-year-old daughter Ellie, two-year-old son Gage and cat Church (short for Winston Churchill) – have recently moved from Chicago to Maine for him to take up a post as head of University Medical Services. Their 83-year-old neighbour across the street, Judson Crandall, becomes a sort of surrogate father to Louis, warning them about the dangerous highway that separates their houses and initiating them with a tour of the pet cemetery and Micmac burial ground that happen to be on their property. Things start getting weird early on: Louis’s first day on the job sees a student killed by a car while jogging; the young man’s cryptic dying words are about the pet cemetery, and he then visits Louis in a particularly vivid dream.
The family surname is no coincidence. “I believe that we go on,” Louis says when Ellie asks him about what happens when we die. “But as to what it’s like, I have no opinion.” So King interrogates what it would be like for the dead to go on literally instead of just figuratively in the remembrance of loved ones. Would bringing the dead back be a cure for grief or a horrible mistake? This sleepy New England town harbours many cautionary tales, and the Creeds have more than their fair share of sorrow. Rachel witnessed her sister’s death from a long illness when she was just a child and has always repressed her memories of it.
Louis is a likable protagonist whose vortex of obsession and mental health (“He walked the balance-beam of rationality”) is gripping. As can be the case with genre fiction, King prioritizes readability over writing quality, though I did pick out an occasional glistening metaphor. It doesn’t get gruesome or schlocky until right towards the end. In the last quarter, which I read on the long train ride home from Edinburgh, I couldn’t get the book closer to my face or the pages turning any faster. It helped that it was a beat-up small-format paperback. When we arrived into London I was about six pages from the end and it was so frustrating to have to wait until I got on my next train to read the rest.
This also counted towards one of my low-key ongoing challenges: reading works published in my birth year. I could imagine the Eighties stylings of an adaptation, especially Rachel’s power suit and pumps when she’s on her race-against-the-clock flight and road trip. I did find the book dated in some of its Murakami-like descriptions (“The … double doors were set into a grassy rise of hill, a shape as natural and as attractive as the swell of a woman’s breast”) and cringey sex scenes, and I wondered if King would get away with using imagery of the Windigo these days. Still, on this evidence, I’ll seek out more of his classic horror – do give me your recommendations. So long as they’re this addictive (and no scarier), I’m game. Pet Sematary was sterling entertainment, but also surprisingly poignant. A message I took away: you just have to live with the pain of loss, not fight it or deny it. “When it started not to hurt, it started not to matter.” (Little Free Library) 
20 Books of Summer, 1–3: Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Daisy Johnson & Ruth Padel
It’s been a slow start to #20BooksofSummer2025 for me, but I’ll hope to do some catching up during our Scotland holiday and then once we’re home in July. So far, I’m sticking to the list I chose last month. These first few were slightly disappointing, to be honest, but I have no doubt I’ll find some gems among my original selections.
Dream Count by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (2025)
This was one of my Most Anticipated books of the year and had a lot to live up to as Adichie’s first novel since the amazing Americanah. When I first attempted to read it, I was dismayed by how much it felt like a rehashing of Americanah, with Chia (a travel writer in Maryland) and her cousin Omelogor (a feminist blogger) together reminiscent of Ifemelu. It did get more readable and somewhat more interesting as it went on. But instead of finding the narration and structure natural, I ended up full of questions about what Adichie intended.
Why four main characters? Why is it the one non-Nigerian who’s poor, victimized, and less proficient in English? (That Kadiatou is based on a real person doesn’t explain enough. Her plight does at least provide what plot there is.) Why are the other three, to varying extents, rich and pretentious? Why are two narratives in the first person and two in the third person? Why in such long chunks instead of switching the POV more often? Why so many men, all of them more or less useless? (All these heterosexual relationships – so boring!) Why bring Covid into it apart from for verisimilitude? But why is the point in time important? What point is she trying to convey about pornography, the subject of Omelogor’s research?
It’s Adichie, so of course she writes solid prose with engaging characters, convincing dialogue, and provocative ideas. There’s a focus here on women’s experiences of attempted or actual motherhood (e.g., PMDD, fibroids, single parenthood or pressure to adopt), and, as per usual, a bit about race (specifically colorism, ethnic prejudice, and code-switching). But the characters’ connections seem weak, their coverage of the range of women’s experiences narrow. The title is, I suppose, the best clue to what Adichie wanted to do with the novel. Everyone dreams of finding, or preserving, love and family. Chia yearns for someone who will truly know her, and because she’s convinced this will be a romantic bond she devotes lockdown to a mental inventory of past relationships. Kadiatou dreams of peace more than of justice, and only in that she gets what she wants is there a happy ending of sorts. I wish I could be more positive, but this was a slog for me. (New purchase – Hungerford Bookshop)
The Hotel by Daisy Johnson (2024)
I’d really enjoyed Johnson’s two novels, Everything Under and Sisters, and have a copy of her previous short story collection, Fen, on the shelf. This completely passed my notice last year. I liked the idea of eerie linked short stories, but I wish I’d known this was originally written for radio as I think it accounts for how simplistic and insubstantial the 15 tales are.
The Hotel is a fenland folly, built on the site of a pond where a suspected witch was drowned. Ever after, it is a cursed place. Those who build the hotel and stay in it are subject to violence, fear, and eruptions of the unexplained – especially if they go in Room 63. Anyone who visits once seems doomed to return. Most of the stories are in the first person, which makes sense for dramatic monologues. The speakers are guests, employees, and monsters. Some are BIPOC or queer, as if to tick off demographic boxes. Just before the Hotel burns down in 2019, it becomes the subject of an amateur student film like The Blair Witch Project.
Scary books don’t tend to work for me because I am often too aware of how they are constructed and so fail to give myself over to the reading experience and take them seriously. I can’t summon much enthusiasm for these stories, though I suppose the setting is rather atmospheric. My favourite was “Infestation,” about two girls – the one (not randomly) named Shirley – who think they discover something down in the laundry room in 1968. Only one of them makes it out alive. Okay, this one was creepy, but the rest left me unmoved. (Gift – purchased with Hungerford Bookshop with Christmas token) 
Girl by Ruth Padel (2024)
Padel is one of my favourite poets and a repeat appearance on my summer reading list; I reviewed her Emerald in 2021. I’ve read 12 of her books now. This collection is about girlhood, by way of personal history and myth.
The first section, “When the Angel Comes for You,” is about the Virgin Mary, its 15 poems corresponding to the 15 Mysteries of the Rosary (as Padel explains in a note at the end; had she not, that would have gone over my head). The opening poem about the Annunciation is the most memorable its contemporary imagery emphasizing Mary’s youth and naivete: “a flood of real fear / and your heart / in the cowl-neck T-shirt from Primark / suddenly convulsed. But your old life // now seems dry as a stubbed / cigarette.” The third section, “Lady of the Labyrinth,” is about Ariadne, inspired by the snake goddess figurines in a museum on Crete. The message here is the same: “there is always the question of power / and girl is a trajectory / of learning how to deal with it”.
But the only poems that truly stood out to me are in the central autobiographical section arising from Padel’s own girlhood as well as her observations of her daughter and grandchild (setting up a Maiden–Mother–Crone triad). “Girl in a Forest” and “Tomboy and Panther” draw on the lure of the jungle to depict a wild child who chooses trousers over skirts. I loved “Fair Verona” for its traveler’s nostalgia but also for the hint of menace: so many tourists fondled the breast on a statue of Juliet that it had to be replaced. “How much touching // does it take for a bronze breast to crack?” the poet asks.
There’s some good alliteration throughout, and I warmed to the vision of girlhood as a time of promise and possibility: “the wonder / the where shall I go what new thing / will this day bring of being a girl.” Overall, though, I didn’t think the book had a lot of substance to convey about its theme. (Gift – purchased with Hungerford Bookshop with Christmas token)
Off to Scotland today. I’ve packed Ice Cream by Helen Dunmore and Pet Sematary by Stephen King from my 20 Books list, plus other books I may substitute in. I’m scheduling a few posts for while we’re away; forgive me if I don’t reply to comments until July.
Bookish Beck = Rebecca Foster. American transplant to England. Freelance proofreader and book reviewer.
