Weird Women & Haunted Houses
As much as I rarely buy newly published books, I make exceptions for curations of ghost stories and new printings of old, often forgotten work. This is a special Halloween review of Weird Women and Haunted Houses.
20th Century
20th Century works were written between 1900 and 1999.
These books are the ones most current readers will recognized. The modern novel has been fully developed and fiction has been separated into categories and genre. The 20th century is the root of recent history. It includes events such as suffrage, World War I, World War II, the Vietnam War, and the Cold War.
Beginning with the Edwardian Era and the Modernist movement, these years explore experiments with form and structure. Post-War and Interwar fiction is often featured in reviews.
If you’re looking for post-modernism, structuralism, post-structuralism, post-post-modernism, or any very recent movement, you will find those listed under contemporary works.
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Horror Stories: Classic Tales from Hoffmann to Hodgson
It might seem strange, and I’m sure it’s not a preference that many people share, but sometimes when I feel my worst — very anxious, very depressed, very not well — and can’t sleep, scary stories are what I turn to. There’s something about ghosts, goblins, vampires, and spooky houses in settings a hundred and fifty years old that draws me out of the racing thoughts my brain gets stuck in. This is a review of Horror Stories.
The Woman in Black
I’ve met people that swear by Camp Crystal Lake and others that don Freddy’s classic bladed gloves or put on the Ghostface mask from the Scream series. But nothing really gives me that feeling of decay, destruction, and ghostliness like stories, films, and books that have Victorian settings. This is a review of Susan Hill’s The Woman in Black.
Thirty Hours with a Corpse and Other Tales of the Grand Guignol
I’m sure you’ve heard of the term ‘Grand Guignol’ as it is used as a description for a modern film or novel. It was actually a theatre in Paris. This is a review of Maurice Level’s Thirty Hours with a Corpse.
Cancer Ward
I’ll always remember the hospital and the hospital basement as one of the settings of my childhood. I spent a lot of time there and listening to my mother’s stories of what it’s like to work in healthcare. This is a review of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s Cancer Ward.
Lark Rise to Candleford
These novels aren’t exactly ‘novels’ per se, in the sense that they are not traditionally structured narratives. Instead, they are more of a collection of stories about rural life in the later nineteenth century. This is a review of Flora Thompson’s Lark Rise to Candleford.
Of Human Bondage
I was first introduced to this book via the 1934 film of the same name that was very loosely based on it. We watched it on Turner Classic Movies one evening and I thought perhaps that the novel would fill in some of the gaps that I saw in the film. This is a review of W. Somerset Maugham’s Of Human Bondage.
The Case Against Satan
For a few years, starting when I was twelve or thirteen I followed the same ritual on Friday nights. Right after dinner, as dusk was falling, I’d walk to the mall across the street and enter the store, making a beeline to my favourite section — the horror movies. This is a review of Ray Russell’s The Case Against Satan.
Don’t Look Now
This week’s Halloween in August pick is from a classic horror writer. It’s a collection of five stories all of them sharing a tone of unease, some with themes of the supernatural, others more about a mystery. This is a review of Daphne du Maurier’s Don’t Look Now.
They
I found this copy in the antiquarian section of a used bookstore in a nearby city and it was a surprise. I’d never heard of the story before, but I couldn’t resist the beautifully bound book, with gold lettering, and a generous amount of very lush colour plates. This is a review of Rudyard Kipling’s They.