As the nights lengthen in wintertime, the world seems to take on a different tone. In a familiar song by Edward Pola and George Wyle, we're told that this is the time for "scary ghost stories and tales of the glories." Here are three books that are perfect to add to the wintry chill.
1. The Dead House by Dawn Kurtagich
This story takes place over the course of several months, but the height of the terror is in the dead of winter. The book starts with reports of a fire on 2 February 2005 that killed three students and injured twenty at Elmbridge High School. The rest of the book is chronicled with references to how many days remain before the fire.
In those days between the end of summer and the fire in February, we hear the story of two girls inhabiting the same body. Carly awakes in the daylight and has the life of a troubled high school student. She has been in and out of psychiatric care after the car crash that killed her parents. When the sun sets, she becomes Kaitlyn,, the other sister whose existence is labeled as a symptom of her Dissociative Identity Disorder. We learn that one or both of them are in danger from supernatural forces and it's not clear who they can trust, if anyone.
Allies try to intervene and save their friends from destruction as the horror builds in the cold months at Elmbridge.
2. The Shining by Stephen King
If you've seen the Stanley Kubrick version of The Shining, you have the basics of the story. A father is hired to be the caretaker of a hotel during the winter season and as the family's isolation grows in the mountains of Colorado, he becomes deranged and antagonistic towards his wife and son, while the son's "shining" allows him to sense danger and call for help when the hotel begins to take over his father.
In the book, there is more of a battle between the elements and the family trapped inside the hotel. We've known since the beginning that the old caretaker went mad in isolation and killed his family and that the roads are impassable in the winter. But we also see Jack Torrance commit acts of sabotage, first in a delusion that he's being taunted by his dead father, and then by destroying their only means of escape. As the spirits of the hotel take a firmer hold, he further blockades his family within its walls.
I'll leave the ending a mystery,, but the winter is a character in itself.
3. Frankenstein by Mary Shelley
When we think of Frankenstein as a name, we tend to turn to Hollywood. There are the creature features of a mad scientist exulting over his ability to bring a monster to life or the flat-topped monster with bolts on either side of his neck and a complicated relationship with humanity.
Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus, is an 1818 novel that is considered the first science-fiction novel. Mary Shelley wrote of a ship's captain at the North Pole who rescues Victor Frankenstein from an ice floe. The young scientist has been chasing his creation, a man created from the remains of humans and some feral animals, who have been wreaking vengeance on those close to his creator. The story, like that of Dracula by Bram Stoke, is epistolary and tells the creature's story through the perspective of the ship's captain, Frankenstein, and Frankenstein's monster.
This slow burn of a book is blood-curdling and thought-provoking in equal measures..