Well, now that we’ve made it past the twin juggernaut that was a Friday the 13th in October and the premiere of Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour movie, it’s probably a good time for a mid-spooky season check-in. I try to focus on reading and watching things that send that proverbial shiver up my spine during October. No other month really provides a neat time-bounded opportunity to indulge in one genre and as I am a scaredy-cat at heart, this injunction let’s me push all the scary stuff to one month. I saturate, then spend November reading fluffy romances to heal myself. Here’s what I am reading/watching, in case you’re looking to do the same.
The Fall of the House of Usher (Netflix): I am a huge fan of Mike Flanagan’s work, including his adaptation of Stephen King’s Gerald’s Game, un under-watched gem. For Netflix, he has focused on adapting horror works that are constitutive of the genre as we know it today. It is horror’s ancestors he is concerned with, whether that be Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House or Henry James’ The Turn of the Screw. In his final piece for Netflix he has turned to the godfather of horror: Edgar Allen Poe. His take on Poe is very modern; he reimagines the House of Usher as a family-run pharmaceutical company responsible for the U.S. opioid epidemic, so, the Sacklers, basically. Roderick Usher has six children and in the first five minutes of the series, we know that they will all die in unique and horrific ways. Flanagan is flying high with this series, walking a tightrope like he was born to it. He’s having ghoulish gothic retributive fun with his source material; I don’t know that anyone has ever captured the weirdness or the camp of Poe so well. This one is full of frights and bloody bits, but it also feels like you’ve been set loose in a lavish haunted house wandering from tableau to tableau.
Holly by Stephen King: King’s latest novel is about two octogenarian academics who have been imprisoning and murdering young people for several years and the detective who is carefully making her way towards them. Holly Gibney is a well-known character in King’s work and this novel finally puts her center stage. Her character stole the show in the HBO adaptation of The Outsider and, as in that story, her strange steadiness keeps us centered. King is a very talented writer, so it is no surprise that this novel is written with clarity and grace. We spend a lot of time with his villains and are able to see the many smaller dark spots in their souls that made their larger atrocities seem possible. But the best time is spent with Holly herself as she carefully gathers information on one lost girl, making her way towards what we already know. King keeps her search realistic and her circumstances prosaic; even as there are monsters snatching children, so also is there COVID, killing her mother and leaving her alone.
The Devil’s Playground by Craig Russell: A lost and supposedly cursed silent era film forms the basis for this unsettling novel. Operating across multiple timelines, the story of how the film was lost and where it is now slowly enfolds. We meet gumshoe detectives and golden era starlets, fixers and moneymen, mobsters and mendacious doctors. The cast of characters is familiar, as are the set pieces, but Russell has enough writing skill to swaddle you in that familiarity rather than bore you with it. There’s some goofy elements to the plot and our main villain, once revealed, feels like they’ve been kept from us for too long to be truly frightening. But the people we do spend time with are compelling and the plot unfolds with style and the scariness level is relatively low, for those looking to just shiver a bit.
Love is Blind (season 5, Netflix): Netflix knew what it was doing when it released this piece of terrorizing trash in October. They knew. By far the worst season in the deeply troubling, uneven, and exploitative marriage-themed freak show that nevertheless continues to draw us in, season five made us question if the concept of the show was ever tenable. Only two couples made it out of the honeymoon phase and only one tied the knot. From early on it was clear none of the couples involved should be within shouting distance of each other. Multiple couples found out their storylines had been cut when the show premiered; one contestant has sued the show for ignoring her filmed sexual assault and falsely imprisoning her. I couldn’t have written a better horror!