It’s that time of the year again. Spooky season, goth Christmas, All Hallow’s Eve. Whatever you call it, Halloween is traditionally when attention turns to the scarier end of the bookshelf. For horror fans it’s a period of fun and frustration. On the one hand, our genre gets its moment to shine darkly; on the other, we have to keep screaming that great horror is out there all year round!
2022 has been a particularly good vintage. In the case of Ally Wilkes’ All the White Spaces (Titan Books £8.99) and Thomas Olde Heuvelt’s Echo (Hodder £9.99), icy shudders are delivered through hauntings at the Earth’s coldest extremities. Olde Heuvelt injects his own mountaineering experience into the story of a mysterious Alpine summit and the creepy influence it exerts over those who climb it, and Echo contains possibly the most frightening prologue ever written.
Wilkes’ doorstopper goes even colder, accompanying a team of southbound polar adventurers in the waning years of the golden age of exploration. What awaits them in Antarctic wastes is far from friendly, but inhuman hostility plays second fiddle to the grim, gruesome toil of life on ship and ice. All the White Spaces treads in the footprints of Dan Simmons’ The Terror, but it takes its own ice-axe to the fantasies of empire and masculinity that underpin this type of adventure story.
Meanwhile, Malcolm Devlin’s And Then I Woke Up (St Martin’s Press £10.99) is a narrow nightmare of a novella. Despite its brevity, Devlin’s post-truth parable is almost too clever to summarise. The initial set-up seems familiar: a zombie outbreak in an anonymous metropolitan city, retold by a survivor. As we peel back the layers of this rotten onion, however, the implications of an alternative truth prove to be more terrible than any undead horde. Already pitch dark, the book accrues awful weight in the wake of Covid denial and political lies.
Jason Rekulak’s Hidden Pictures (Little, Brown £14.99) is a lot more fun. Part ghost story, part social-inequality satire, it follows Mallory, who begins a nanny job that is recognisable from every “creepy little kid” movie you’ve ever seen. The kid in question, Teddy, loves to draw, and his efforts are reproduced alongside Rekulak’s easy-going prose. Soon Teddy’s drawings begin to depict nasty things, offering a parallel narrative of violence and haunting, as well as genuine paper jump-scares.
The Hacienda (Bantam £20.99) is haunted by more sombre spirits. Isabel Cañas’ historical gothic is set in the aftermath of the Mexican war of independence but riffs on the Brontës’ domestic terrors. It treads similar ground to other post-colonial gothic revisions of late, but goes above and beyond in the extremity of the demonic events within the house. Bonus points are awarded for plumbing the full occult potential of Catholic ritual.
Alexis Henderson’s House of Hunger (Bantam £16.99) takes the gothic even further afield. It begins in a steampunk city-state before heading north – aboard a blood-fuelled train, no less – to a Great House ripped straight from central European history. There, Marion serves as bloodmaid to The Countess, a relationship as erotic as it is exploitative. Of course, in true gothic style, Marion sets out to hunt down the secrets of the house … and finds surprisingly horrible things. Henderson’s world-building has something of the grotesque novelty of Mervyn Peake’s Gormenghast, tinged red by a Clive Barker-esque blending of blood and sex. It’s a lurid, luscious debauch of a book.
Returning to more familiar shores, Fiona Barnett’s The Dark Between the Trees (Rebellion £15.99) is an exercise in classic English folk horror. One half of the dual narrative follows a troop of Roundhead soldiers on an ill-fated retreat through some very weird woodland. In the present day, a group of women undertake a research expedition to discover the soldiers’ fate. Of course, neither walk in the woods goes well. The Dark Between the Trees filters the excavated history of Sarah Moss’s Ghost Wall through the high-strangeness of Jeff VanderMeer’s Annihilation. Barnett’s grasp of ineffable oddness would make Algernon Blackwood proud. Folktale is layered upon legend and mixed with myth, suggesting that truth in such matters is a porous, honeycombed thing.
This is just a small sample of the dark delights that have been published this year. There are so many more I could recommend. I hope you enjoy whichever scary book you choose, but please remember, horror stories are for life, not just for Halloween.
