by Maria Haskins
The very first ghost story that made an indelible impression on me was Oscar Wilde’s The Canterville Ghost, as read by famed Swedish actor Stig Järrel. This audio version was first released in 1975 and became a beloved classic in Sweden. I’m not sure how old I was when I heard it, but I was definitely a pre-teen. To this day, I have a deep fondness for Wilde’s story (which I think is novelette-length by today’s standards) about a British nobleman’s ghost and what happens when an American family moves into his haunted castle. Perhaps that early spooky encounter is a partial explanation for why two of my favorite horror sub-genres are Haunted Houses and Ghost Ssdtories.
This year, I’ve read several bone-chilling and goosebump-inducing titles in those sub-genres, and here are 10 of my favorites, with a curated selection of ghostly short fiction as a bonus.
Mapping the Interior by Stephen Graham Jones
I recently re-read this 2017 novella, and it is such a strange, visceral, and thoroughly disturbing story. A teenage boy named Junior is sleepwalking when he wakes and sees his long-dead father striding through his family’s home one night. No one else seems to notice he’s there, not Junior’s mom who is working her fingers to the bone to keep the family afloat, or Junior’s younger brother, Dino, who is suffering from seizures and is being mistreated and bullied at school. Trying to solve the mystery of his dad’s reappearance, Junior maps the house and its immediate surroundings, but what he finds just seems to lead him, and his brother, into more danger. The broken, jagged shards of a submerged family tragedy poke through the surface of this story, and by the end, those shards cut Junior right to the bone.
The Redemption of Morgan Bright by Chris Panatier
Two sisters are at the heart of this tale: Hadleigh Keene and Morgan Bright. Hadleigh is dead, and Morgan blames herself for her sibling’s mysterious death on a road near Hollyhock Asylum. Morgan goes undercover at the asylum as a patient under an assumed name, looking for answers, but the longer she stays, the more her mind, and her identity, seem to come undone. I love every bit of this book: the unraveling narrators, the switching points of view, the way I could slowly begin to see how the mystery would unfold, and yet be utterly surprised by the way the story twists in the end. This is a tortured, brilliantly devious tale and I could barely put it down.
Incidents Around the House by Josh Malerman
Malerman tells this story from the perspective of Bela, an eight-year-old girl who is haunted by Other Mommy, a malevolent entity that lives in Bela’s room and who asks her every day: “Can I go inside your heart?” As Other Mommy gets ever more insistent and menacing, Bela’s family, her mom and dad and grandmother, also start experiencing disturbing events in the house and Bela knows the only way to stop what’s happening, is by doing what Other Mommy wants. Some books are so good, but also so harrowing and emotionally wrenching that you know once you finish reading that you won’t ever read that book again. This novel is that kind of book. I could barely put it down while reading, but I don’t think I can ever read it again.
This Cursed House by Del Sandeen
It’s 1962 and Jemma Barker leaves her home and her life in Chicago for a well-paying job with the wealthy and very eccentric Duchon family in New Orleans. Jemma is hoping for a fresh start, but the Duchons, and their reasons for hiring Jemma, are much more complicated and nefarious than they seem on the surface. For one thing, the family seems unable to leave their house and property, and Jemma soon realizes they want her help breaking a century-old curse. This is a carefully woven mystery tale haunted by the history of slavery and full of ghosts, lies, and old family secrets.
The Haunting of Room 904 by Erika T. Wurth
Olivia Becente is a paranormal investigator with a gift for communing with the dead. She’s good at her job, but she’s struggling with the grief and trauma of losing her sister, Naiche, who had the same supernatural ability as Olivia. When Olivia hears from the Brown Palace, a hotel in Denver, it leads her to room 904, the scene of a terrifying, re-occurring, and inexplicable series of deaths, all happening in the room Naiche visited before her death. This paranormal thriller is chockfull of the kind of stuff I love about horror: freaky visions and jump-scares in mirrors, scary things happening in your peripheral vision, ghosts mingling with assorted other-worldly creatures, and vivid, wicked dreams. It’s a fast-paced tale with some real historical, emotional, and spiritual depth beneath the horror.*
The Cold House by A.G. Slatter
This brand-new horror/mystery novella by Angela Slatter is steeped in grief, magic, nightmares, ghosts, and family secrets. Writer Everly Bainbridge has lost her husband and her daughter in a terrible accident. After the tragedy, a mysterious lawyer shows up and Everly finds out that a) her husband was not who she thought he was, and b) he was rich, and now she’s a wealthy widow. The lawyer also finds a big old house in a small town where Everly goes to rest and try to recover from her grief. As it turns out, the old house has a very strange cellar, a suspiciously cold room, and Everly finds herself haunted by the voice and spectral presence of her dead daughter. This story goes to some deep and shadowy places (literally) as Everly delves into the truth of the mysterious house, and her husband’s past. Slatter twists the plot in unexpected ways, always with a sharp, dark sense of humor running through the unfolding horrors.
The Curse of Hester Gardens by Tamika Thompson
I’m reading an advance reading copy of this novel right now (it’s out next year), and it is an utterly compelling supernatural tale, set in a public housing project. Thompson gives us not just a haunted house but an entire haunted neighborhood. In Hester Gardens, the restless spirits of those who died violently linger in homes, streets, and alleyways, and some of them want to hurt, and kill, the living. Thompson skillfully handles the balance between real-world horrors (crime, gun violence, systemic racism, poverty), and a decidedly otherworldly menace. I especially loved the main character, Nona, a mom who is deeply flawed and carries around a heavy burden of guilt. There’s an almost Shakespearean tilt to the tragedy that plays out here, in a place where secrets, lies, and ghosts tug and tear at people’s lives.
In my previous What to Read column, I also covered three of my favourite ghostly reads from this past year::
It Was Her House First by Cherie Priest, which includes a lot of insight into how to fix up an old house, and how to deal (and not deal) with grief and ghosts.
Summer in the House of the Departed by Josh Rountree, about a haunted house and a haunted childhood, for those of us who love a lyrical depth to the darkness
Psychopomp & Circumstance by Eden Royce, where magic, death, and family (found and otherwise) are woven together into a quietly compelling tale.
For those looking for some ghostly, haunted short fiction, I have several recommendations too.
- The main character in the hilarious and heartbreaking “We Are the Flower” by Claire Humphrey in Podcastle (narrated by Jen R. Albert) is a foul-mouthed ghost who is trying (maybe?) to come to terms with their demise and understand what to do in the afterlife.
- One of my all-time favorite ghostly stories is “If a Bird Can Be a Ghost”, by Allison Mills in Apex about Shelly and her grandma who “teaches her about ghosts, how to carry them in her hair.” Mills weaves together magic and spirituality, life and afterlife, childhood and adolescence, grief and family into a story that is both haunting and deeply moving.
- “Never Yawn Under a Banyan Tree”, by Nibedita Sen in Anathema is wickedly funny as it deals with family, unladylike behavior, sexuality, and a very hungry, food-loving ghost.
- “Find On Your Body the Bruise”, by Mar Stratford in Shimmer follows a dead woman who lingers at the site of her murder in order to find the man who killed her. It’s a shattering and devastatingly intimate tale about life and death, violence and finding peace.
- In “The Three Nights of the Half-Gent”, by Mário de Seabra Coelho in Strange Horizons, a ghost revisits a love from his past. This is a different kind of ghost story, all aglow with gorgeous prose, and its very own take on what might happen after death.
“Some Breakable Things”, by Cassandra Khaw in The Dark is unsettling and heart-wrenching as it follows a woman haunted by regret, grief, and her father. It’s the kind of horror that makes me ache when I read it, because the feelings it evokes are so excruciatingly real.
