Fall is my favorite time of year--if only the weather would cooperate and turn cooler it would be perfect. And I love that my favorite season coincides with Carl's annual reading event: RIP (or, Readers Imbibing Peril), which means all (bookish) things ghastly and ghostly (as Carl has so perfectly christened it). Ghost stories and cool brisk weather just go together, don't you think? I've been thinking about this for a while now (all summer long I've been dreaming of cool weather), and had set aside a few books in anticipation.
This year I think I want to read some good ghost stories (both long and short), and I plan on throwing myself in wholeheartedly. I am very much in the mood for the sort of story that raises the hair on the back of your neck, if you know what I mean. I need some good stories to escape into, and I think I've picked some very good books to read that will do just that.
Cue photo of possible RIP reads. I've actually started two of these already--I couldn't wait. I'll definitely be reading Peter Straub's Ghost Story (which has been a reading contender for previous RIPs). It begins with a man driving south to Florida with a young girl who is not his daughter. Has he kidnapped her? She seems a little off kilter, too, as though there is something not quite right about her. Already from the first page Straub has hooked me.
I just bought The Haunting of Maddy Clare by Simone St. James (a book that will be doing double duty as the author is Canadian, so this will fit perfectly with my Canadian reading project that I am very ready to get back into). For once I'll be reading a new purchase right away rather than letting it sit on my bookshelf. The story is set right after WWI when a young woman who is getting by working temporary jobs is hired to assist a ghost hunter. This is the other book I've started reading and so far it seems to be an easy but engaging read.
I'd like to read four books over the course of the next two months, so other possibilities include:
The Silence of Herondale by Joan Aiken, which is a story in the vein of Mary Stewart and Victoria Holt. It sounds like your basic gothic romance--"an ancestral mansion and an eerily quiet village threaten the life of a young governess".
I love the sound of Mary Elizabeth Braddon's The Trail of the Serpent. Plus it has the added benefit of being a good Victorian 'sensational' novel. "The novel features Jabez North, a manipulative orphan who becomes a ruthless killer; Valerie de Cevennes, a stunning heiress who falls into North's diabolical trap; and Mr. Peters, a mute detective who communicates his brilliant reasoning through sign language".
Another Victorian author who almost seems a little out of place in this sort of list, George Eliot, wrote the novella The Lifted Veil which has been compared with the work of Mary Elizabeth Braddon and Mary Shelley. "A chilling tale of moral alienation and despair".
It's definitely time to get back to Adam McOmber's This New & Poisonous Air, which is a collection of short stories. They've been called a hybrid of Edgar Allen Poe, Jorge Luis Borges and Henry James. I've already read the first three in the collection, which all had a decidedly creepy air about them.
Alison Lurie's collection of short stories, Women and Ghosts: Tales, also caught my eye. These sound like unusual ghost stories--a combination of funny and unsettling. One reviewer compared them to Dorothy Parker crossed with Edgar Allen Poe.
And last but not least, I've been holding on to The Haunting Ground by Cliff McNish for the better part of this year waiting for RIP in order to pull it out to read. It is a YA novel that I am told is really very scary. "Can Elliott and his family escape the clutches of Glebe House? Or will they be trapped in the maze of corridors, forever hunted by the dead."
As always my choices are open to reconsideration. I might well come across the perfect book to read later on.
I'm also planning on reading a short story each week for the next couple of months. I'll be digging around my shelves pulling out my ghost story collections (I should have a few volumes of creepy stories) and maybe seeing what I can find at my library.
And I decided to load Neil Gaiman's The Graveyard Book onto my MP3 player as well. I've got a good variety of stories and formats as you can see.
I'm very much looking forward to this. August was a great month for traveling, but it was pretty lousy for reading, so hopefully I'll get my reading mojo back this month. I'm going to be optimistic since I have such a great pile of books to choose from!