Every year around October I like to read spooky books and every year around November I post about what I read and this is this year’s post and previous posts can be read here okay let’s go!

• The Gold-Bug and other tales by Edgar Allan Poe
• Rekt by Alex Gonzalez
• The Unmothers by Leslie J. Anderson
• La ruta del hielo y la sal de José Luis Zárate

The Gold-Bug and other tales by Edgar Allan Poe — This is a collection of some of Poe’s most famous and celebrated short stories. Instead of reviewing it as a whole, I’m going to do a mini-review of each story!

LIGEIA. A widower remarries, then his second wife dies. He spends a night confined in a bedchamber with the corpse, and repeatedly sees the corpse flush with life again, and begin to resemble his first wife, Ligeia. A decent story, ticks a lot of the Poe boxes (dead women, “I’m not crazy,” horrifying architecture), though not the best of any of those categories. The poem “The Conqueror Worm” is cool.

THE FALL OF THE HOUSE OF USHER. Narrator visits the final remnant of the House of Usher, a brother and sister, living in a gloomy decadent manor. The physical house and the family house are identified. It’s a pretty straightforward concept but well executed.

THE MURDERS IN THE RUE MORGUE. I hate this story. After an obnoxious throat-clearing half-baked essay on chess vs. checkers, we get an extremely contrived mystery. The themes are a mess, as the narrator at times insists on a kind of implacable “x can only mean y” logic, but at others appeals to chaos and coincidence, with no coherent schema to integrate the two. The story is quite remarkable as the first English detective story, an obvious blueprint for Sherlock Holmes, but it doesn’t hold up on its own.

THE MASQUE OF THE RED DEATH. Quarantine party 🥳💃🎉. Hey, who’s that uggo with the death mask?? 💀 More surreal, horrifying architecture here. Short and sweet.

THE PIT AND THE PENDULUM. Okay, this one is really about the horrifying architecture. Narrator finds himself in a deep dark dungeon, at the mercy of the Spanish Inquisition. Increasingly elaborate life-threatening machinations are introduced. Morbidly delightful. Jigsaw should take notes.

THE TELL-TALE HEART. A perfect story. Poe believed that short story writers should strive for a unity of effect, where every element of the story is chosen and crafted in the service of that effect. In a review of Hawthorne he wrote, “If his very initial sentence tend not to the outbringing of this effect, then he has failed in his first step. In the whole composition there should be no word written, of which the tendency, direct or indirect, is not to the one pre-established design.” “The Tell-Tale Heart” achieves this better than any other Poe story I’ve read, and stands as a great testament to the virtue of this approach. Its first sentence is “True!—nervous—very, very dreadfully nervous I had been and am; but why will you say that I am mad?” and there’s not a single wrong step from there.

THE GOLD-BUG. Moderately entertaining treasure hunt story, though without any sense of adventure or danger.

THE BLACK CAT. Very similar to the Tell-Tale Heart in a lot of ways, although in the Tell-Tale Heart the narrator’s violence is motivated by an unexplained disgust and contempt for his neighbor’s eye. In the Black Cat the narrator is just an abusive alcoholic, which I find less compelling. Still, as things escalate to murder the narrator veers further into outright madness, and the ending is fun.

THE CASK OF AMONTILLADO. Unlike other narrators who plead their sanity despite their violence, this narrator’s sanity is never in question, and his murderous turn is quite plainly justified: he has been insulted, and he is Italian. A short, direct, and morbidly funny story. For the love of God, Montresor!

I read this for a book club that I host, and since they’re public domain stories, I went ahead and made an ebook compilation of them in various formats to share with readers. If you’d like to read some, here they are: PDF — Epub — Mobi. Or you can find a complete collection of Poe’s stories at Standard Ebooks, which is where I copied the text from.

Rekt by Alex Gonzalez — When I first checked this book out from my library’s Overdrive catalog, I thought it would be a kind of 21st-century Videodrome, a book about the horror of being online. Imagine my terror when, not an hour into listening to it, I realized it was in fact a book about the horror of living in Tallahassee, Florida!!!! (NB: Tallahassee is my hometown, and presently sits at a comfortable distance of 1,000 miles from my residence in Philadelphia.)

I’m only half joking. Rekt is narrated by Sammy Dominguez, a fairly average recent college grad who’s a little too into watching gore videos online. His life is upended when his girlfriend dies in a car crash, and all his plans and hopes for the future die with her. Then someone on a creepypasta site he used to post on sends him the URL of a dark web site, with a single link on it—a link to the CCTV footage of his girlfriend’s death.

But that’s just the beginning. Sammy realizes he can search other names on this website, finding other pages with dozens of videos of people dying in bizarre and sensational ways. There are even videos of people who are still alive. There are even videos of him.

So where does Tallahassee come into it? That’s where Sammy’s girlfriend died, and it’s where he and the book spend a significant amount of time, sinking into a deeper and deeper malaise. This is what pulled me into the book—it doesn’t just go through the expected beats of a descent into madness, Sammy actually starts to get better, before he gets much worse, and for the first part of the book, you’re mostly reading a realistic, crushing portrayal of self-destruction. And yes, I did receive psychic damage whenever, e.g., Gonzalez references Strozier Library or Proof Brewing. And yes, Tallahassee really is an avatar of stagnation and failure, at least from the narrator’s point of view. His girlfriend was just there for college, but she had bigger plans for her life, so Sammy staying there is a kind of purgatory.

The book twists and turns, and the reveal about the nature of the dark web site with all the impossible gore videos is compelling, if a little implausible. Without spoiling it, I was expecting a more supernatural explanation, but it’s really just mundane, maybe science fictional—I didn’t buy it, and I just personally think something supernatural/unreal would’ve been more interesting. But the premise does serve as a dark, thrilling playground for Sammy to explore in the second half, where he goes from scared and confused and hunted, to scared and confused and hunting.

Throughout all this, the book’s greatest strength is the psychodrama. Sammy’s own internal turmoil, and his relationships with others, are an engrossing, grounding throughline. The blurb promises an examination of toxic masculinity, but it really isn’t. Sammy’s shitty self-destructive behavior has much more to do with his traumatic past than it does with being socialized as a dude. Likewise, I don’t think this book is really about being online. Being online is more of a comorbidity with Sammy’s grief, it’s not the force driving him down this fatal path. Sammy’s fucked-up-ness is particular, not generalizable. Not that this book has nothing to say about being online or toxic masculinity, no—it’s more that those things are just given components of its world, just like race and class and alcoholism. They’re the natural environment of this character, who is our main focus.

Although the book didn’t always go where I wanted it to, for the book it’s trying to be, Gonzalez did an excellent job. I listened to the audiobook narrated by Robb Moreira, which was great, although I had to pick up a physical copy for the very end, where the book becomes a montage of forum discussions and text threads. I don’t think there’s a way to render that as effectively in audio as they did in print, so I recommend anyone listening try and do the same, if you can.

The Unmothers by Leslie J. Anderson — Carolyn Marshall is a journalist sent to the rural horse-breeding town of Raeford to cover a story about a horse that gave birth to a human baby. Normally, Marshall and the paper she works for would never cover such nonsense, but following her husband’s death, Marshall has been acting out at the office. She’s being sent away as a time-out, essentially. Shortly after her arrival, though, she winds up with a real story: horses mysteriously set loose from their barn, and a dead man in the middle of a field.

The book is told from many different perspectives. The father of the newborn, his mother, and Marshall are the main ones, but we also see a smattering of other townspeople. It gives a really full picture of this town, the way of life there, how it looks from the outside and within. That portrayal of Raeford, which is both grounded and slightly surreal, is the book’s greatest strength. The multiple perspectives are a bit clumsily handled, though.

For a more minor example, all the townspeople know the secret of the town, but Anderson has to coyly guide their thoughts away from it when we’re in their viewpoints. This is mildly irritating, but it’s one of those things I’ll accept for the sake of maintaining the mystery. The bigger issue comes in the second half. The story is ramping up in tension, but we’re getting brand new viewpoint characters, or characters who have barely been in the story for the past hundred pages. And even within their chapters, Anderson is dropping little backstory paragraphs that have no bearing on the present crisis. There is an otherworldly horse-deer-death-beast roaming the town, I don’t wanna read about anyone other than Marshall and the baby daddy!

And Marshall’s character, such a strong hook for the early chapters of the book, gets lost in the clutter. Her epilogue is unconvincing—whatever growth and resolution she experienced to get there, I didn’t see it on the page.

Overall, I did enjoy this book. For all its flaws, the strongest elements—the portrayal of Raeford, the depiction of horses, horse-riding, horse-breeding, and the novel premise of horse girl horror—really hit the mark. There is something beautiful and terrifying about horses, a simultaneous strength and fragility, which Anderson has captured here. It’s a book from the heart, and if the description I’ve offered thus far piques your interest, I’d strongly recommend it.

La ruta del hielo y la sal de José Luis Zárate — Esta novela corta trata del viaje del Deméter, la goleta que transporta el conde Drácula de Bulgaria a Inglaterra. En el Drácula de Bram Stoker este viaje se relata tras unas breves entradas de la bitácora del capitán. La ruta del hielo y la sal de Zárate nos presenta este viaje tras los pensamientos, sueños, pesadillas y anhelos del capitán … y más luego unas entradas de la bitácora, también.

¡Y qué anhelos tan carnales tiene este capitán! La novela comienza con un largo discurso sobre la sal, cómo entra en cada grieta y pliegue, y cómo el capitán desea lamerla de los pieles de sus hombres. El capitán es un homosexual ruso al fin del siglo XIX, y solo una vez, en juventud, ha podido lograr sus deseos. Ahora reprime esos deseos fuertemente. Todavía existen y lo atormentan, pero los mantiene adentro, a la vista de nosotros los lectores.

Todo el libro tiene un estilo de corriente de conciencia, un hilo narrativo sinuoso. El capitán medita en sus fantasías, se pregunta sobre los motivos de su tripulación, sobre la naturaleza de su carga (cincuenta cajas de tierra negra), y, de vez en cuando, vuelve a relatar unos hechos del viaje. Todo esto me encantaba, porque la prosa de Zárate es muy poética, llena de imágenes y olores y sensaciones, y siempre compuesta de párrafos cortos, casi epigramáticos. Ejemplo:

Los marinos son la mujer de Lot.
Seres de sal. (13)

Otro, más tarde:

Conducimos un bosque nocturno hacia otras oscuridades, inmersos en el aroma de la tierra oculta en la bodega. (78)

Y además de ser hermosa, esta prosa establece un tono gótico y funesto, y nos da poco a poco detalles de la vida anterior del narrador.

La única falla que puedo indicar es que, en la primera sección, estas divagaciones sensoriales a veces me parecían repetitivas. Pero en cuanto todos las ratas desaparecen del buque, el narrativo va más deprisa, con mejor equilibrio de acontecimientos y reflexiones. Leí las últimas cuarenta páginas con cada vez más gozo. En el fin, Zárate reúne la historia personal del narrador y el término fatídico del Deméter perfectamente, y el libro me dejó en la mente unas imágenes fantasmagóricas para divertirme largo tiempo después.

También puedo recomendarlo para los lectores de español como segunda lengua. Como dijo, es una novela corta, compuesta de secciones cortas, las cuales están igualmente compuestas de párrafos y oraciones cortas. Y salvo los términos marinos, el vocabulario es de un nivel intermedio, bien accesible.

Alright now for all the non-Spanish speaking Anglos, the condensed review is that I enjoyed this book a lot, it’s very well written, and while I found the discursive, lyrical meanderings of the narrator a bit repetitive in the first half, it really picked up toward the end and stuck the landing. Gay maritime vampire fiction. Poetic, punchy prose, short sentences and paragraphs. Haunting images. There’s an English translation by David Bowles which I can’t speak to the quality of, but I imagine it’s pretty good.

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Alright that’s that for this year’s Spooktober! Next week I’ll be posting my short story “Poison Pill,” so look forward to that. Also, on the off chance that you live in Scotland and you’re reading this in time, my zine Masters of the Wine Printers Guild will be available for purchase from Plaintext Distro at Edinburgh Zine Fair on November 7th! Plaintext Distro is a zine distro which sells “low tech, anti-capitalist, bitsyfolk, game-making and cultural zines” at cost, which is around £2. Pretty cool stuff, I believe there may be an option for online orders at some point, I’ll mention it in a post if/when that happens. And of course digital copies of Masters of the Wine Printers Guild are available free online here. Okay see you next week!