There are certain people who keep holidays all year round. Sometimes, they're admired for keeping Christmas in their hearts at all times (Ebenezer Scrooge), but if you spend enough time on social media, you'll run across complaints that it's not even September and they're selling Halloween decorations. I admit that am a person who doesn't let the calendar dictate my habits, so I never stop listening to Christmas music and it is always spooky season for me.
I also am known for loving horror, thriller, suspense, etc. Having just spent some time in Salem, here are a few recommendations for books that will draw out your natural anxiety at any time of year.
The Historian by Elizabeth Kostova
I love epistolary tales and, of course, that began with my first reading of Bram Stoker's Dracula. Told in letters, the reader understands only snatches of the story as each narrative arc focuses on certain events before Stoker brings them all together.
Kostova's debut novel consists in large part of notes, letters, and journal-like chronicles and it connects generations of mystery. A young woman finds a notebook in her father's study that is blank except for a woodcut of a dragon in the center. Included with the book are letters that begin, "My dear and unfortunate successor." She learns that this almost blank book was left in a study carrel her father frequented as a student and that his mentor was also in possession of a similar volume.
As the story unfolds, we learn of several historians' hunt for the true Dracula and realize that the book is an invitation to a quest that may lead to the Impaler himself. I am certain that Stoker would have approved of the intricacy of the storytelling.
The Dead House by Dawn Kurtagich
This 2015 novel has a complicated story structure. It begins with a newspaper article about a school fire and a police report concerning the Johnson Incident. We are then told the story of this fire through diary entries, post-it notes, transcripts of therapy sessions, and so on.
The action focuses on Carli Johnson, a student at Elmbridge High School, and Kaitlyn Johnson, "the girl of nowhere." We discover through these sources that Carli lives life until sundown and then Kaitlyn emerges as another self. They never interact directly, but sense each other in passing and leave each other notes. Kurtagich says in an author's note that this came out of her experience with inversion syndrome,, when she was awake at night. "During those nights, I began to think about what kind of life someone who had only ever known such darkness would have."
The result is chilling. We discover that Carli and her closest friends have been working with occult forces to influence the sisters' connections. The trick is that Carli begins to disappear as an influence and Kaitlyn, desperate to save her, resorts to dangerous means to delve into her own madness. "The Dead House," crumbling and dilapidated, is how she sees her own mind.
The Shining by Stephen King
Even if you've seen the movie or the miniseries based on this novel, the book is absolutely essential for fans of the mysterious and dread. In fact, I'd consider it a separate story.
If you're not familiar with either, this is about a family locked away from the world. Jack Torrance has lost his job as a schoolteacher and takes a job as a winter caretaker for the Overlook Hotel in Colorado. Being snowed in all winter will give him time to finish his play and try to heal his relationship with his wife and son. The hotel comes to life and begins trying to subvert Jack's will. His son has premonitions and clairvoyant experiences about the hotel's past violence and possible explanations for it.
The Stanley Kubrick film adaptation covers most of those plot points, but veers pretty severely from what makes the original so suspenseful. In the book, we don't see Jack typing the same words over and over each day or chasing Wendy and Danny through a frozen maze. Instead, he begins with a clear purpose for his play that begins to be shaped by the resentment that is taking over his mind as he falls prey to shame and anger. There is a history of violence in the family that Wendy wisely remembers and Jack feels trapped by the monster she sees in him. His story is one of self-sabotage that culminates in self-sacrifice.
Doomsday Book by Connie Willis
This is not strictly one genre, but it could be considered science-fiction horror, historical fiction, etc. As a novel in the Oxford Time Travel series, it explores what happens when historians do research by venturing into other centuries. A professor remembers going to the middle of the Blitz, for example. Kivrin Engle is a student at Oxford who would love to study the 14th century in England. She learns Middle English and Latin, dyes her own wool, and even comes up with a cover story for when she arrives on the Oxford-Bath Road in 1320.
There are perils ranging from robbers to hypothermia, but no sooner has she traveled into the past than the people left behind at the university come down with the flu. A mysterious illness begins to affect the people who worked with Kivrin on her preparations and soon begins infecting tourists and locals alike. They can't even tell if everything went all right with the time travel because the first person to fall ill is the technician who was supposed to study the results.
Meanwhile, Kivrin finds herself in a land where she can't speak the language for some reason and she is increasingly convinced that something has gone wrong. She spends days suffering the same influenza as the people at Oxford before recovering and befriending the contemporaries who took her into their home.
It all goes horribly wrong when she realizes that, through an error, she was sent to Oxford at Christmas in 1348 and had a front-row seat to the first instances of the bubonic plague. She's all right--she had a vaccine before she left England--but it remains to be seen if her knowledge of history and medicine will help her save any of the friends she has made.
Written in the 1980s, this sometimes does not age well--it talks about how badly Americans handled a pandemic, for example--but it is suspenseful to the last page and emotionally intense for readers.