I went looking for scary reads to feature here, but although I found some things I liked, I struck out when it came to true horror. My selections turned out to be more suitable for the original pagan festival of Samhain, which marks the end of the growing season and honors the dead.

First, because I was in the mood to read something I already knew I liked, I did a re-read of Charlaine Harris’s four-book series about Harper Connelly. Harper has a strange gift, bestowed upon her when she was struck by lightning and lived: She can find dead people, and she can tell you how they died. Traveling with her step-brother Tolliver as her manager, she roves around the country giving the living (and the dead) closure, and getting paid for it. The problem is, although she can see the circumstances surrounding their death, the murderer, if such there be, is never included in the vision.

I don’t know what it is about this series that sets it apart for me, but I enjoy it more than any of Harris’s other series (which I also like). The combination of what Harper Connelly does and how she does it, combined with the poignant story of her hard life and the partnership with her “brother,” Tolliver, just pulls me in.

I hesitated on where to “store” this series on my “shelves” on Goodreads, however, because despite the fact that it contains paranormal activity and is occasionally pretty spooky, the books read more like mystery stories than anything else; once Harper discovers the cause of death, the next natural step is for the relatives and friends of the deceased (and the police) to want to know how, why, and who, if murder is the answer. So I put the series under paranormal AND mystery, and then decided against horror, even though there is some creep factor. Definitely worth a read, however. The four books are Grave Sight, Grave Surprise, An Ice Cold Grave, and Grave Secret.

The next thing I picked up to connect with Hallowe’en was John Searles’s book, Help for the Haunted. The premise for this one sounded intriguing, and at first I thought it would be a good, spooky tale. The set-up of a couple who “helps” haunted souls was interesting, particularly because the author doesn’t go into much initial detail about exactly how they help, so I was left wanting more. The back-and-forth of the story from before to after the couple’s death, all told from the viewpoint of their youngest daughter, Sylvie, was puzzling, and the device of an unreliable narrator (because she was young and naive) and an unreliable secondary character (Sylvie’s volatile sister Rose, whose actions and viewpoints couldn’t be trusted) kept things suspended in “what if?” for quite a while.

When I first started reading it,
I got a feeling not unlike reading We Have Always Lived in the Castle, by Shirley Jackson. Not to say that this anywhere equals the brilliance of that book, but just that you find yourself inside this family with people who seem normal but aren’t, and people who seem crazy but aren’t, and you keep reading because you want to find out what’s true.

Ultimately, this author left important revelations for way too long, spinning out the story with a few seemingly supernatural events here and there to string the reader along, but ultimately I became bored with all the back-and-forth that led nowhere. Once Sylvie determined that she would figure out who killed her parents, no matter what, and sought out such pivotal characters as her uncle, the man who wrote a not-entirely-flattering biography of her parents, and the man she initially suspected of their murder, things finally began to pick up again…only to mean virtually nothing in the face of a completely implausible, albeit surprising, ending.

This book could have been so much more—the characters of Sylvie and Abigail were particularly intriguing, and there were so many ways the author could have chosen to taken it…but he didn’t. I can’t say I liked it, but I can’t condemn it as wholly bad either. A good effort that ultimately disappointed. And I couldn’t even shelve it in “horror.” More gothic and paranormal than anything, with a small modicum of suspense.

My final choice was Diane Setterfield’s book, Bellman & Black. This book has been on my “to read” list for awhile; I had previously read and greatly enjoyed The Thirteenth Tale by this author, and knew that even if this wasn’t the ultimate in horror, it would at least be intelligent, well written and well plotted. The jacket copy telling us “rooks never forget” sounded ominously Edgar Allan Poe-ish…

I am loving this book…but you couldn’t account it as horror by any stretch (at least not so far), although parts are foreboding, haunting, and mysterious. It has the same old-fashioned fairy-tale-retelling feel as a strange and fanciful book by Tom McNeal called Far, Far Away that I read a few years back with my high school book club.

Because I took so many days to read Help for the Haunted, I wasn’t able to finish Bellman & Black in time to review it for today’s post, so that will wait for a day or two—I still have about half the book to go.
But I feel pretty confident that Setterfield will not disappoint, and that it’s sufficiently ghost-filled to make for satisfying reading on All Hallows Eve.

In the spirit of the holiday and the theme of Bellman & Black, here are a pair of rooks, styled after Odin’s corvids Huginn and Muninn. Happy Hallowe’en, and Blessed Samhain to you!