Roundup: 4 horror books with fearsome storytelling chops just in time for Halloween

Fairy Tale

By Stephen King

Simon & Schuster, 600 pages, $39.99

During the multiple COVID lockdowns, while most of us were wringing every penny from our Netflix subscriptions, Stephen King asked himself a question: “What could you write that would make you happy?” He immediately saw, in his mind’s eye, the image of a “vast deserted city, deserted but alive.” King followed that vision into the sub-basements of his fecund imagination and came back with “Fairy Tale.” The hero (and narrator) is Charlie Reade, a teenage version of King’s American Everyman — self-reliant, haunted by private grief and thoroughly decent. Charlie is drawn to the “deserted but alive” city after he comes to the aid of a curmudgeonly old man who lives with his German shepherd in a ramshackle house nearby. The resulting friendship draws Charlie into a mysterious parallel world entered via a portal in a shed in the house’s backyard. King clearly fulfilled his COVID mandate: “Fairy Tale” is a dark tale but a happy one, told in broad but vivid strokes, well-paced and suspenseful.

Close to Midnight

By Mark Morris, ed.

Flame Tree Press, 296 pages, $21.95

Horror stories written over the last few years, like those collected in “Close to Midnight,” are bound to focus on themes of isolation, detention, loss of personal agency and general social paranoia. That lockdown-era catalogue of fears and cognitive disruptions finds its purest form in several of the stories, most effectively in Adam Nevill’s “Rise Up Together” and “The Nine of Diamonds” by Carole Johnstone. “Rise Up Together” reimagines the horror of forced confinement by implacable authority figures through a grotesquely comic conceit of age triumphing over youth. Johnstone’s story is a seemingly more subdued tale of economic desperation and corporate malfeasance that only shows its teeth in a well-earned surprise ending. A sense of loss pervades the entire collection; as writers continue to process the pandemic’s fallout, more such tales are bound to find their way into print.

The Witch in the Well

By Camilla Bruce

Tor, 300 pages $35.95

Camilla Bruce’s impressive knowledge of European folklore allows her to carve out, in her fiction, an eerie borderland between the realm of ancestral pagan beliefs and our supposedly rationalist modern age. In “The Witch in the Well,” Bruce updates the epistolary form — through the deployment of emails, blogs, book excerpts and traditional diaries — to explore the legacy of a 19th-century murder, in which Ilsbeth, a wealthy woman accused of witchcraft in an American farming community, was drowned in a well by her neighbours. Now Catherine, a local wannabe author, has made it her life’s mission to clear Ilsbeth’s name, but her plans are thwarted when a former childhood friend (and bestselling author) also decides to write a book that will tell the accused witch’s “real story.” This is a superb folk horror tale that delivers an imaginative feminist take on the historical persecution of witches through the conflicting viewpoints of three complex and at times believably unlikeable female protagonists.

Dark Observation

By Catherine Cavendish

Flame Tree Press, 230 pages, $21.95

Violet, a typist in London during the bleakest days of the Second World War, knows that she has it better than most of her fellow Londoners. Her job in a government typing pool keeps her fed, housed and relatively safe from the Luftwaffe’s raids, but the work is dreary and repetitive. When she is offered a spot as a typist in the top-secret Cabinet War Rooms housed beneath Parliament, Violet jumps at the opportunity. Her new job, and the arrival of an exotic woman at Violet’s boarding house, soon drag her into a vast occult conspiracy that aims to derail the British war effort. “Dark Observation” overlays the tight pacing and intrigue of the spy thriller with a genuinely creepy atmosphere, and the historical details ring true without feeling intrusive.

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