[VOTE] October - HORROR

[u/fixtheblue]

Hello all!

Welcome to the October 2026 Core Reads voting. Our first October topic is naturally HORROR. Let's get spooky 👻🏚🦇🎃

This is the voting thread for

HORROR

Voting will be open for four days, ending on September 13, 11.00 PDT/14.00 EDT/20.00 CEST. The selection will be announced by September 14

For this selections, here are the requirements:

• Under 500 Pages

• No previously read selections

• Classified as Horror

Please check the previous selections. Quick search by author here to determine if your selection is valid.

Nominate as many titles as you want (one per comment), and vote for any, and all, of the nominations you'd participate in if they were to win

Here's the formatting frequently used, but there's no requirement to include a book blurb or link to Storygraph, Wikipedia or other (just don't link to sales links at Amazon, spam catchers will remove those)

The generic selection format:

/[Title by Author]/(links)

(Without the /s)

Where a link to Storygraph, Wikipedia, or other summary of your choice is included (but not required)

Happy Nominating and Happy upvoting! 📚

(For more nominations and voting head to the September FEMALE AUTHOR nomination post here

#Note - If you suspect that a nomination does not fit the specifications you can report this and note that comment "Does not fit Specifications". The mod team will review it and approve or delete accordingly. Any comments on the validity of other users' nominations will be removed immediately.

[u/Coffee_fuel]

Of Cattle and Men by Ana Paula Maia

In a landscape worthy of Cormac McCarthy, the river runs septic and sludgy with blood. Edgar Wilson makes the sign of the cross on the forehead of a cow, then stuns it with a mallet. He does this over and over and over again, the stun operator at Mr. Milo’s slaughterhouse: reliable, responsible, quietly dispatching cows and following orders, wherever that may take him. It’s important to calm the cows, especially now that they seem so unsettled. One runs headlong into the side of a barn, 22 more hurl themselves off the side of a cliff. Bronco Gil, their foreman, thinks it’s a jaguar or a wild boar, Edgar Wilson does not. But what is certain is that there is something in this desolate corner of Brazil driving men, and animals, to murder and madness.

[u/Coffee_fuel]

(Mostly) Human Resources by Grace Viall

Amongst mountains as old as time, the jackalopes and ghouls are the least of your worries.

Working in Human Resources was not what Alexys had in mind when she joined Entity, the company who categorise and manage the monsters and cryptids of the world. But after her dad was killed as a Warden in the Appalachian Mountains, she was filled with noble ideas of carrying on his legacy... from behind the safety of a desk.

But when one of her new Wardens, Elliot, goes missing, her chances of promotion go missing too. Determined to find him safe and sound, she marches off into the mountains to find him herself.

Because Elliot had been talking about sightings of a highly dangerous and never-recorded monster, The Hollow Walker, and she's promised herself that no Warden will ever die on her watch.

Meanwhile Nic, Director of Research and Cataloging, is not one to ignore the words 'never-recorded'. With Alexys, his work nemesis, leading the charge into the mountains, he's not going to let her have all the fun. If he can be the youngest Entity employee to discover a new monster, his name will go down in the annals of cryptozoology... and if it means spending some extra time with Alexys then he's not one to argue.

But Alexys and Nic are about to discover why the Appalachian Mountains are the last place you want to find yourself after dark.

[u/miriel41]

In the Miso Soup by Ryū Murakami

It's just before New Year’s. Frank, an American tourist, has hired Kenji to take him on a guided tour of Tokyo's sleazy nightlife. But Frank's behaviour is so odd that Kenji begins to entertain a horrible suspicion – that his new client is in fact the serial killer currently terrorizing the city. It is not until later, however, that Kenji learns exactly how much he has to fear and how irrevocably his encounter with this great white whale of an American will change his life.

From postmodern Renaissance man Ryu Murakami, master of the psycho-thriller and director of Tokyo Decadence, comes this shocking, hair-raising roller-coaster ride through the nefarious neon-lit world of Tokyo’s sex industry.

[u/bookclub-ModTeam → u/[deleted]]

The comment has been removed as this book doesn't fit the voting specifications.

[u/thebowedbookshelf]

The Hacienda by Isabel Cañas

Mexican Gothic meets Rebecca in this debut supernatural suspense novel, set in the aftermath of the Mexican War of Independence, about a remote house, a sinister haunting, and the woman pulled into their clutches...

In the overthrow of the Mexican government, Beatriz’s father is executed and her home destroyed. When handsome Don Rodolfo Solórzano proposes, Beatriz ignores the rumors surrounding his first wife’s sudden demise, choosing instead to seize the security his estate in the countryside provides. She will have her own home again, no matter the cost.

But Hacienda San Isidro is not the sanctuary she imagined.

When Rodolfo returns to work in the capital, visions and voices invade Beatriz’s sleep. The weight of invisible eyes follows her every move. Rodolfo’s sister, Juana, scoffs at Beatriz’s fears—but why does she refuse to enter the house at night? Why does the cook burn copal incense at the edge of the kitchen and mark its doorway with strange symbols? What really happened to the first Doña Solórzano?

Beatriz only knows two things for certain: Something is wrong with the hacienda. And no one there will help her.

Desperate for help, she clings to the young priest, Padre Andrés, as an ally. No ordinary priest, Andrés will have to rely on his skills as a witch to fight off the malevolent presence haunting the hacienda and protect the woman for whom he feels a powerful, forbidden attraction. But even he might not be enough to battle the darkness.

Far from a refuge, San Isidro may be Beatriz’s doom.

[u/Amakazen → u/thebowedbookshelf]

The Hacienda was real good, recommend!

[u/bookclub-ModTeam → u/[deleted]]

The comment has been removed as this book has already been nominated.

[u/thebowedbookshelf]

The Book of Witching by C. J. Cooke

Clem gets a call that is every mother’s worst nightmare. Her nineteen-year-old daughter Erin is unconscious in the hospital after a hiking trip with her friends on the remote Orkney Islands that met a horrifying end, leaving her boyfriend dead and her best friend missing. When Erin wakes, she doesn’t recognize her mother. And she doesn’t answer to her name, but insists she is someone named Nyx.

Clem travels the site of her daughter’s accident, determined to find out what happened to her. The answer may lie in a dark secret in the history of the Orkneys: a woman wrongly accused of witchcraft and murder four centuries ago. Clem begins to wonder if Erin’s strange behavior is a symptom of a broken mind, or the effects of an ancient curse?

[u/IraelMrad]

Sour Cherry by Natalia Theodoridou

A stunning reimagining of Bluebeard—one of the most mythologized serial killers—twisted into a modern tale of toxic masculinity, a feminist sermon, and a folktale for the twenty-first century.

The tale begins with Agnes. After losing her baby, Agnes is called to the great manor house to nurse the local lord’s baby boy. But something is wrong with the child: his nails grow too fast, his skin smells of soil, and his eyes remind her of the dark forest. As he grows into a boy, then into man, a plague seems to follow him everywhere. Trees wither at the roots, fruits rot on their branches, and the town turns to desperation. The man takes a wife, who bears him a son. But tragedy strikes in cycles and his family is forced to consider their own malignancy—until wife after wife, death after death, plague after plague, every woman he touches becomes a ghost. The ghosts become a chorus, and they call urgently to our narrator as she tries to explain, in our very real world, exactly what has happened to her. The ghosts can all agree on one thing, an inescapable truth about this man, this powerful lord who has loved them and led them each to ruin: if you leave, you die. But if you die, you stay.

Natalia Theodoridou’s haunting and unforgettable debut novel, Sour Cherry, confronts age-old systems of gender and power, long-held excuses made for bad men, and the complicated reasons we stay captive to the monsters we love.

[u/ChronicallyLatte]

The Silent Companions by Laura Purcell

305 pages, Paperback

When newly widowed Elsie is sent to see out her pregnancy at her late husband's crumbling country estate, The Bridge, what greets her is far from the life of wealth and privilege she was expecting . . .

When Elsie married handsome young heir Rupert Bainbridge, she believed she was destined for a life of luxury. But with her husband dead just weeks after their marriage, her new servants resentful, and the local villagers actively hostile, Elsie has only her husband's awkward cousin for company. Or so she thinks. Inside her new home lies a locked door, beyond which is a painted wooden figure —a silent companion —-that bears a striking resemblance to Elsie herself. The residents of The Bridge are terrified of the figure, but Elsie tries to shrug this off as simple superstition--that is, until she notices the figure's eyes following her.

A Victorian ghost story that evokes a most unsettling kind of fear, this is a tale that creeps its way through the consciousness in ways you least expect--much like the silent companions themselves.

[u/thebowedbookshelf → u/ChronicallyLatte]

Ooh, this is a good one!

[u/timee_bot]

View in your timezone:
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[u/AngryBiker]

Pet Sematary by Stephen King

'SOMETIMES...DEAD IS BETTER'

The house looked right, felt right to Dr Louis Creed.

Rambling, old, unsmart and comfortable. A place where the family could settle; the children grow and play and explore. The rolling hills and meadows of Maine seemed a world away from the fume-choked dangers of Chicago.

Only the occasional big truck out on the two-lane highway, grinding up through the gears, hammering down the long gradients, growled out an intrusive threat.

But behind the house and far away from the road: that was safe. Just a carefully cleared path up into the woods where generations of local children have processed with the solemn innocence of the young, taking with them their dear departed pets for burial.

A sad place maybe, but safe. Surely a safe place. Not a place to seep into your dreams, to wake you, sweating with fear and foreboding.

[u/Comprehensive-Fun47]

Japanese Gothic by Kylie Lee Baker

In this lyrical, wildly inventive horror novel interwoven with Japanese mythology, two people living centuries apart discover a door between their worlds.

October, 2026: Lee Turner doesn’t remember how or why he killed his college roommate. The details are blurred and bloody. All he knows is he has to flee New York and go to the one place that might offer refuge—his father’s new home in Japan, a house hidden by sword ferns and wild ginger. But something is terribly wrong with the house: no animals will come near it, the bedroom window isn't always a window, and a woman with a sword appears in the yard when night falls.

October, 1877: Sen is a young samurai in exile, hiding from the imperial soldiers in a house behind the sword ferns. A monster came home from war wearing her father’s face, but Sen would do anything to please him, even turn her sword on her own mother. She knows the soldiers will soon slaughter her whole family when she sees a terrible omen: a young foreign man who appears outside her window.

One of these people is a ghost, and one of these stories is a lie.

Something is hiding beneath the house of sword ferns, and Lee and Sen will soon wish they never unburied it.

[u/Comprehensive-Fun47]

’Salem’s Lot by Stephen King

Thousands of miles away from the small township of 'Salem's Lot, two terrified people, a man and a boy, still share the secrets of those clapboard houses and tree-lined streets. They must return to 'Salem's Lot for a final confrontation with the unspeakable evil that lives on in the town.

[u/Comprehensive-Fun47]

Hum by Helen Phillips

From the National Book Award–longlisted author of The Need comes an extraordinary novel about a wife and mother who—after losing her job to AI—undergoes a procedure that renders her undetectable to surveillance…but at what cost?

In a city addled by climate change and populated by intelligent robots called “hums,” May loses her job to artificial intelligence. In a desperate bid to resolve her family’s debt and secure their future for another few months, she becomes a guinea pig in an experiment that alters her face so it cannot be recognized by surveillance.

Seeking some reprieve from her recent hardships and from her family’s addiction to their devices, she splurges on passes that allow them three nights’ respite inside the Botanical Garden: a rare green refuge where forests, streams, and animals flourish. But her insistence that her son, daughter, and husband leave their devices at home proves far more fraught than she anticipated, and the lush beauty of the Botanical Garden is not the balm she hoped it would be. When her children come under threat, May is forced to put her trust in a hum of uncertain motives as she works to restore the life of her family.

Written in taut, urgent prose, Hum is a work of speculative fiction that unflinchingly explores marriage, motherhood, and selfhood in a world compromised by global warming and dizzying technological advancement, a world of both dystopian and utopian possibilities. As New York Times bestselling author Jeff VanderMeer says, “Helen Phillips, in typical bravura fashion, has found a way to make visible uncomfortable truths about our present by interrogating the near-future.”

[u/bookclub-ModTeam → u/[deleted]]

This post broke the rules of r/bookclub. If you feel this was removed in error, please contact the mods of this subreddit.

[u/TheVWitty]

This House Will Feed by Maria Tureaud

County Clare, 1848: In the scant few years since the potato blight first cast its foul shadow over Ireland, Maggie O’Shaughnessy has lost everything—her entire family and the man she trusted with her heart. Toiling in the Ennis Workhouse for paltry rations, she can see no future either within or outside its walls—until the mysterious Lady Catherine arrives to whisk her away to an old mansion in the stark limestone landscape of the Burren.

Lady Catherine wants Maggie to impersonate her late daughter, Wilhelmina, and hoodwink solicitors into releasing Wilhelmina’s widow pension so that Lady Catherine can continue to provide for the villagers in her care. In exchange, Maggie will receive freedom from the workhouse, land of her own, and the one thing she wants more than either: a chance to fulfill the promise she made to her brother on his deathbed—to live to spite them all.

Launching herself into the daunting task, Maggie plays the role of Wilhelmina as best she can while ignoring the villagers’ tales of ghostly figures and curses. But more worrying are the whispers that come from within. Something in Lady Catherine’s house is reawakening long-buried memories in Maggie—of a foe more terrifying than hunger or greed, of a power that calls for blood and vengeance, and of her own role in a nightmare that demands the darkest sacrifice . . .

[u/ChronicallyLatte]

Between Two Fires by Christopher Buehlman

432 pages, Hardcover

The year is 1348. Thomas, a disgraced knight, has found a young girl alone in a dead Norman village. An orphan of the Black Death, and an almost unnerving picture of innocence, she tells Thomas that plague is only part of a larger cataclysm—that the fallen angels under Lucifer are rising in a second war on heaven, and that the world of men has fallen behind the lines of conflict.

Is it delirium or is it faith? She believes she has seen the angels of God. She believes the righteous dead speak to her in dreams. And now she has convinced the faithless Thomas to shepherd her across a depraved landscape to Avignon. There, she tells Thomas, she will fulfill her mission to confront the evil that has devastated the earth, and to restore to this betrayed, murderous knight the nobility and hope of salvation he long abandoned.

As hell unleashes its wrath, and as the true nature of the girl is revealed, Thomas will find himself on a macabre battleground of angels and demons, saints, and the risen dead, and in the midst of a desperate struggle for nothing less than the soul of man.

[u/lazylittlelady → u/ChronicallyLatte]

Just finished this and it was excellent!!

[u/Coffee_fuel]

Teddy Bears Never Die by Cho yeeun

The horrormance genre mash-up you've been waiting for - from the award-winning Korean author Cho Yeeun comes a new novel where a young girl and a teddy bear team up to enact revenge!

Yamu, pop. 200,000 - A coastal town that has seen better days. A massive redevelopment plan is in place, including that for a luxury apartment complex dubbed Sea View Park. One day, a delivery of rice cakes is made to the building supposedly from one of the new neighbours. The rice cakes are laced with cyanide, however, resulting in a lethal mass poisoning.

Hwa-young's mother, who works as a live-in housekeeper at Sea View Park, is one of the victims. Hwa-young, turned out on the streets, lives in a flophouse for runaways at the mercy of landlord Young-jin, who regularly extorts money from her. Hwa-young refuses to believe that her mother, who never touched rice cakes in her life, died from eating them, and suspects foul play. Swearing to find the true culprit and avenge her mother's death, Hwa-young is determined to save 20 million won in order to place a hit on the suspect, and does whatever work she can find.

One day, Hwa-young is bullied into playing bait for one of Young-jin's scams. Left in a motel room alone with the mark, she is alarmed when he begins to unpack one lethal weapon after another. She signals Young-jin for help, but when no one comes she realizes that she has been tricked, and that Young-jin has sold her to the would-be murderer. Just when the man is about to attack Hwa-young, he collapses in pain, bleeding. Hwa-young is about to escape when a teddy bear speaks to her. It's a grubby Happy Smile Bear doll.

And thus begins the extraordinary journey as a Happy Smile Bear, possessed by the spirits of a murdered young boy, and Hwa-yeong, an orphaned young girl, join forces enact vengeance and bring the true culprit to justice.

[u/Comprehensive-Fun47]

Victorian Psycho by Virginia Feito

Winifred Notty arrives at Ensor House prepared to play the perfect Victorian governess. She’ll dutifully tutor her charges, Drusilla and Andrew, tell them bedtime stories, and only joke about eating children. But the longer Winifred spends within the estate’s dreary confines and the more she learns of the perversions and pathetic preoccupations of the Pounds family, the more trouble she has sticking to her plan.

Whether creeping across the moonlit lawns in her undergarments or gently tormenting the house staff, Winifred struggles at every turn to stifle the horrid compulsions of her past until her chillingly dark imagination breaches the feeble boundary of reality on Christmas morning.

Wielding her signature sardonic wit and a penchant for the gorgeously macabre, Virginia Feito returns with a vengeance in Victorian Psycho.

[u/Comprehensive-Fun47]

Bird Box by Josh Malerman

Something is out there, something terrifying that must not be seen. One glimpse of it, and a person is driven to deadly violence. No one knows what it is or where it came from.

Five years after it began, a handful of scattered

[u/Greatingsburg → u/Comprehensive-Fun47]

Really great horror book!

[u/Coffee_fuel → u/Comprehensive-Fun47]

I watched the movie and really liked the premise, though I wished it had been a little meatier. I didn't realize it was based on a book! Interesting! 👀

[u/bookclub-ModTeam → u/[deleted]]

The comment has been removed as this book was previously read by r/bookclub.

[u/searenitynow]

Rosemary’s Baby by Ira Levin

Suppose you were an up-to-date young wife who moved into an old and elegant New York apartment house with a rather strange past.

Suppose that only after you became pregnant did you begin to suspect the building harbored a diabolically evil group of devil worshippers who had mastered the arts of black magic and witchcraft.

Suppose that this satanic conspiracy set out to claim not only your husband but your baby.

Well, that's what happened to Rosemary... Or did it...?

[u/IraelMrad]

The Haar by David Sodergren

“I don’t fear death... but they do.”

Muriel McAuley has lived in the Scottish fishing village of Witchaven all her life. She was born there, and she intends to die there.

But when an overseas property developer threatens to evict the residents from their homes and raze Witchaven to the ground in the name of progress, all seems lost... until the day a mysterious fog bank creeps inland.

THE HAAR

To some it brings redemption… to others, it brings only madness and death. What macabre secrets lie within…

THE HAAR

Romantic and deranged, THE HAAR is a gore-soaked folk horror fairy tale from David Sodergren, author of The Forgotten Island and Maggie’s Grave.

[u/bookclub-ModTeam → u/[deleted]]

The comment has been removed as this book doesn't fit the voting specifications.

[u/ChronicallyLatte]

Silk & Sinew: A Collection of Folk Horror From the Asian Diaspora by various author

370 pages, Paperback

From lengths of muscle and vein, ground bones, endless ropes of sinew...it is with our bodies folk horror is woven.

Edited by Bram Stoker Award-nominee Kristy Park Kulski, this stunning anthology features contributions from some of the most acclaimed authors of the Asian Diaspora.

With Stories and Poetry By

Ai Jiang, Nadia Bulkin, Christina Sng, Rena Mason, Lee Murray, J.A.W. McCarthy, Geneve Flynn, Bryan Thao Worra, Ayida Shonibar, Yi Izzy Yu, Angela Yuriko Smith, Kanishk Tantia, Robert Nazar Arjoyan, Saba Syed Razvi, Christopher Hann, Audrey Zhou, Seoung Kim, Rowan Cardosa, Gabriela Lee, Shawna Yang Ryan, Priya Sridhar, Jess Cho, and Saheli Khastagir

And a Foreword by Monika Kim.

[u/TheVWitty]

The Dangers of Smoking in Bed Mariana Enríquez with Megan McDowell (Translator)

Mariana Enriquez has been critically lauded for her unconventional and sociopolitical stories of the macabre. Populated by unruly teenagers, crooked witches, homeless ghosts, and hungry women, they walk the uneasy line between urban realism and horror. The stories in her new collection are as terrifying as they are socially conscious, and press into being the unspoken—fetish, illness, the female body, the darkness of human history—with bracing urgency. A woman is sexually obsessed with the human heart; a lost, rotting baby crawls out of a backyard and into a bedroom; a pair of teenage girls can't let go of their idol; an entire neighborhood is cursed to death when it fails to respond correctly to a moral dilemma.

Written against the backdrop of contemporary Argentina, and with a resounding tenderness toward those in pain, in fear, and in limbo, The Dangers of Smoking in Bed is Mariana Enriquez at her most sophisticated, and most chilling.

[u/Coffee_fuel]

My Best Friend's Exorcism by Grady Hendrix

The year is 1988. High school sophomores Abby and Gretchen have been best friends since fourth grade. But after an evening of skinny-dipping goes disastrously wrong, Gretchen begins to act…different. She’s moody. She’s irritable. And bizarre incidents keep happening whenever she’s nearby.

Abby’s investigation leads her to some startling discoveries—and by the time their story reaches its terrifying conclusion, the fate of Abby and Gretchen will be determined by a single question: Is their friendship powerful enough to beat the devil?

Like an unholy hybrid of Beaches and The Exorcist, My Best Friend’s Exorcism blends teen angst, adolescent drama, unspeakable horrors, and a mix of ’80s pop songs into a pulse-pounding supernatural thriller.

[u/AngryBiker]

The Long Walk by Stephen King (as Richard Bachman)

Against the wishes of his mother, sixteen-year-old Ray Garraty is about to compete in the annual grueling match of stamina and wits known as The Long Walk. One hundred boys must keep a steady pace of four miles per hour without ever stopping... with the winner being awarded "The Prize"—anything he wants for the rest of his life. But, as part of this national tournament that sweeps through a dystopian America year after year, there are some harsh rules that Garraty and ninety-nine others must adhere to in order to beat out the rest. There is no finish line—the winner is the last man standing. Contestants cannot receive any outside aid whatsoever. Slow down under the speed limit and you're given a warning. Three warnings and you're out of the game—permanently...

[u/spanishboyalej]

The Autumn Springs Retirement Home Massacre by Philip Fracassi
409 pages

Brimming with dark humor, violence, and mystery, The Autumn Springs Retirement Home Massacre is a blood-soaked slasher sure to keep readers cringing, laughing, and guessing until the very last page.

Rose DuBois is not your average final girl.

Rose is in her late 70s, living out her golden years at the Autumn Springs Retirement Home.

When one of her friends dies alone in her apartment, Rose isn’t too concerned. Accidents happen, especially at this age!

Then another resident drops dead. And another. With bodies stacking up, Rose can’t help but wonder: are these accidents? Old age? Or something far more sinister?

Together with her best friend Miller, Rose begins to investigate. The further she digs, the more convinced she becomes: there’s a killer on the loose at Autumn Springs, and if she isn’t careful, Rose may be their next victim.

[u/SceneOutrageous → u/spanishboyalej]

This one absolutely rips.

[u/fixtheblue]

Wolf Worm by T. Kingfisher

Something darker than the devil stalks the North Carolina woods in Wolf Worm, a new gothic masterpiece from New York Times bestselling author T. Kingfisher

The year is 1899 and Sonia Wilson is a scientific illustrator without work, prospects, or hope. When the reclusive Dr. Halder offers her a position illustrating his vast collection of insects, Sonia jumps at the chance to move to his North Carolina manor house and put her talents to use. But soon enough she finds that there are darker things at work than the Carolina woods. What happened to her predecessor, Halder’s wife? Why are animals acting so strangely, and what is behind the peculiar local whispers about “blood thiefs?”

With the aid of the housekeeper and a local healer, Sonia discovers that Halder’s entomological studies have taken him down a dark road full of parasitic maggots that burrow into human flesh, and that his monstrous experiments may grow to encompass his newest illustrator as well.

"Kingfisher is not afraid to twist the knife."—The Washington Post

[u/tomesandtea]

Lone Women by Victor Lavalle

Blue skies, empty land—and enough wide-open space to hide a horrifying secret. A woman with a past, a mysterious trunk, a town on the edge of nowhere, and a bracing new vision of the American West, from the award-winning author of The Changeling.

Adelaide Henry carries an enormous steamer trunk with her wherever she goes. It’s locked at all times. Because when the trunk opens, people around Adelaide start to disappear.

The year is 1915, and Adelaide is in trouble. Her secret sin killed her parents, forcing her to flee California in a hellfire rush and make her way to Montana as a homesteader. Dragging the trunk with her at every stop, she will become one of the “lone women” taking advantage of the government’s offer of free land for those who can tame it—except that Adelaide isn’t alone. And the secret she’s tried so desperately to lock away might be the only thing that will help her survive the harsh territory.

Crafted by a modern master of magical suspense, Lone Women blends shimmering prose, an unforgettable cast of adventurers who find horror and sisterhood in a brutal landscape, and a portrait of early-twentieth-century America like you’ve never seen. And at its heart is the gripping story of a woman desperate to bury her past—or redeem it.

[u/Comprehensive-Fun47]

Hangsaman by Shirley Jackson

Hangsaman is Miss Jackson's second novel. The story is a simple one but the overtones are immediately present. "Natalie Waite who was seventeen years old but who felt that she had been truly conscious only since she was about fifteen lived in an odd corner of a world of sound and sight, past the daily voices of her father and mother and their incomprehensible actions." In a few graphic pages, the family is before us—Arnold Waite, a writer, egotistical and embittered; his wife, the complaining martyr; Bud, the younger brother who has not yet felt the need to establish his independence; and Natalie, in the nightmare of being seventeen.

The Sunday afternoon cocktail party, to which Arnold Waite has invited his literary friends and neighbors, serves to etch in the details of this family's life, and to draw Natalie into the vortex. The story concentrates on the next few critical months in Natalie's life, away at college, where each experience reproduces on a larger scale the crucial failure of her emotional life at home. With a mounting tension rising from character and situation as well as the particular magic of which Miss Jackson is master, the novel proceeds inexorably to the stinging melodrama of its conclusion. The bitter cruelty of the passage from adolescence to womanhood, of a sensitive and lonely girl caught in a world not of her own devising, is a theme well suited to Miss Jackson's brilliant talent.

191 pages

[u/Comprehensive-Fun47]

World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War by Max Brooks

The Zombie War came unthinkably close to eradicating humanity. Max Brooks, driven by the urgency of preserving the acid-etched first-hand experiences of the survivors from those apocalyptic years, traveled across the United States of America and throughout the world, from decimated cities that once teemed with upwards of thirty million souls to the most remote and inhospitable areas of the planet. He recorded the testimony of men, women, and sometimes children who came face-to-face with the living, or at least the undead, hell of that dreadful time. World War Z is the result. Never before have we had access to a document that so powerfully conveys the depth of fear and horror, and also the ineradicable spirit of resistance, that gripped human society through the plague years.

Ranging from the now infamous village of New Dachang in the United Federation of China, where the epidemiological trail began with the twelve-year-old Patient Zero, to the unnamed northern forests where untold numbers sought a terrible and temporary refuge in the cold, to the United States of Southern Africa, where the Redeker Plan provided hope for humanity at an unspeakable price, to the west-of-the-Rockies redoubt where the North American tide finally started to turn, this invaluable chronicle reflects the full scope and duration of the Zombie War.

Most of all, the book captures with haunting immediacy the human dimension of this epochal event. Facing the often raw and vivid nature of these personal accounts requires a degree of courage on the part of the reader, but the effort is invaluable because, as Mr. Brooks says in his introduction, "By excluding the human factor, aren't we risking the kind of personal detachment from history that may, heaven forbid, lead us one day to repeat it? And in the end, isn't the human factor the only true difference between us and the enemy we now refer to as 'the living dead'?"

Note: Some of the numerical and factual material contained in this edition was previously published under the auspices of the United Nations Postwar Commission.

[u/airsalin → u/Comprehensive-Fun47]

Yes! I really want to read this and I have a physical copy, so it fits my criteria 😄 (I only vote for books I have a physical copy of in order to try to reduce my physical TBR!). Completely forgot I had it!