It's Decorative Gourd Season, Motherfuckers
Jay Z was so right when he said "goblin, ghoul, a zombie with no conscience"
(Pretend I have a pair of plastic dracula teeth in my mouth but they’re the cheap ones so they keep falling out:) Velcome to a very spooky edition of Trope Machine! (Taking the teeth out, obviously frustrated that they’re in a child’s size that won’t fit in my adult jaw but trying to play it off) Okay but seriously folks. I read about spooky stuff all year long and then I get a solid four weeks where it seems at all appropriate to constantly talk about it, so let me fill you in on a few of my favorite monsters I’ve read about recently:
The ghosts in My Darling Dreadful Thing aren’t exactly scary, though they are pretty garish, and they’re not exactly malignant, even if they’re intrinsically codependent. In Johanna Van Veen’s world, ghosts are what happens when a body is prevented from decomposing — mummification traps the ghost inside the shell. (Does this mean that at least one person in this book knows exactly how to make a ghost? I’ll never tell!!! But yes. Yes it does.) A bond with a living person is what draws them out of their graves (or bogs, or Roman Centurion Tombs) and seems to sustain them. Protagonist Roos’ spirit companion, Ruth, is still leathery and withered in accordance with her bog body origins. She’s childish and possessive and at times moody, and Roos’ loving descriptions about the sound of Ruth’s jawbones clacking together are in equal parts creepy and charming — Van Veen deserves credit for fresh contributions to the Ghost Portrayal Sciences.
The Woods All Black might be one of the most efficient books I read this year, packing an awful lot into 160 pages: Appalachian folklore. The Horrors of Gender. Religious trauma. Barn sex. Unapologetic, bloody vengeance? Yes.
I really can’t do a lot to describe the monster that prowls this book without spoiling it but here’s a David Lynch meme for you if you’re ok with a light spoiler.
(I even made it real little to make it less of a spoiler.)
Episode Thirteen has just landed at the top of my list of “haunted house books that get real freaky with it.” (Honorable mentions: You Should Have Left; 12 Nights at Rotter House.) What starts as a husband-wife team of ghosthunters jumping the shark to save their TV show swiftly opens up into a murky exploration of what a ghost even is. It’s like watching a TV show and suddenly the entire set collapses, leaving the characters surrounded by miles of mist in every direction. It was really wild to read something that captured, like, ancient myth levels of spiraling madness in a modern setting.
I’m going to be super honest with you right now. If there were not a single vampire in Vampires of El Norte and the book was just about The Real Vampires Being Society or something and nobody got any blood sucked at all I would still have shoe-horned it into this list because it’s the best book ever and I just finished reading it today and I’m obsessed with it. It containing actual vampires is, as far as I’m concerned, a happy accident.
As children, Nena and Nestor encounter a vampire in the woods near the rancho that Nena’s family owns and Nestor’s family works on. It attacks her, so severely that Nestor believes Nena is dead and that it’s his fault and flees out of guilt and shame. For nine years he mourns her while wandering from town to town as a vaquero for hire while she spends her nights wondering why he left her without so much as a goodbye. Then, intensifying skermishes with the US in the north puts them both on the same battlefield at the same time. This book has already been earmarked, by me, for a future museum exhibit I’m calling “The Most Down Bad Men In All of Human History.” Nestor is overjoyed that Nena, his childhood soulmate, is alive, and Nena is mad as fuck at him for inexplicably leaving. He would give her the moon and the stars and probably his own kidney but he keeps accidentally mentioning stuff like “all the rich widows he’s been having sex with,” causing her to slam doors in his face both literally and metaphorically. It’s a book about the bravery required of true love in the face of insecurities and past mistakes and family expectations and, yes, vampires. AND YES OKAY THE VAMPIRES ARE KIND OF A METAPHOR FOR SOCIETY BUT IT’S GOOD ACTUALLY.