If you’re friends with me on Spotify and you’ve seen me listening to playlists with titles like ‘reading in the Hogwarts library while it’s raining’, no you haven’t. But the principle stands: autumnal ambiance suits Edinburgh. Here are some reads to ease you into the spooky season.
We Have Always Lived in the Castle by Shirley Jackson
Troubled teen Merricat, her older sister Constance, and their enfeebled Uncle Julian are the only surviving family members after an arsenic-laced sugar bowl wipes out their relations. Unlike the mansion in Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House, this haunted house lacks any supernatural presence. Instead, it brims with the mounting violence of the past, and burns from the accusatory gaze of the surrounding townsfolk. Jackson weaves dark comedy with claustrophobic unease in this masterpiece of suspense.
Holly by Stephen King
Otherwise known as the Mariah Carey of Halloween, Stephen King’s power as the supreme of horror fiction rises as the daylight hours wane. His latest novel may just eclipse previous autumnal King favourites (11.22.63, a time travel novel set in the days surrounding the assassination of JFK, is a requisite November read). Holly’s unsettling tale of two murderous, octogenarian college professors is the perfect thriller to complement your return to university.
Beloved by Toni Morrison
The reader can decide whether Beloved is a ghost story or not. Sethe is haunted by the memories of her pre-civil war past as a slave in Ohio, which she fruitlessly attempts to repress. Her home is possessed by the ghostly, rage-filled presence of her child, who died unnamed but with the gravestone inscription of ‘Beloved’. The real horror, of course, is not Beloved, but the unimaginable and intergenerational trauma of slavery: the reverberations of which are staggeringly confronted.
The Secret History by Donna Tartt
Booktok has mercilessly squeezed all life out of recommending this psychological novel, but I could not, in good conscience, exclude it. Pretentious? Yes. But equally hypnotic, as the reader is invited into a hedonistic and murderous clique of Classics students at an elite college in rural Vermont. With sentences like: ‘Radiant meadows, mountains vaporous in the trembling distance; leaves ankle-deep on a gusty autumn road; bonfires and fog in the valleys; cellos, dark window-panes, snow’, it is required reading for anybody who chose Edinburgh purely based on brochure pictures of Old College.
The Dutch House by Ann Patchett
Filled with the possessions of the family who once owned it, the Dutch house has a memory all its own. Siblings Danny and Maeve share a dark fairy-tale of a family, marked by a lost mother and the threat of an evil stepmother. Despite the unshakeable grief and raw believability of the characters, The Dutch House is coated with a smooth, fairy-tale glaze. Just sometimes, it’s nice to have a happy ending.
“Autumn Edinburgh” by ddh Photos is licensed under CC BY-ND 2.0