An end of week recap

“Guy, guy, guy
Poke him in the eye,
Put him on the bonfire,
And there let him die.”
– Traditional Guy Fawkes ditty

In good windupian tradition, I creepify the post nearest Hallowe’en, which means you may come across ominous-looking links leading to frightful features scattered amongst the usual bookish blether – and of course, Guy Fawkes Night is but three days away, so the fun continues.

As ever, this is a post in which I summarise books read, reviewed and currently on my TBR shelf. In addition to a variety of literary titbits, I look ahead to forthcoming features, see what’s on nightstands and keep readers abreast of various book-related happenings.

CHATTERBOOKS >>

If you are planning a reading event, challenge, competition, or anything else likely to be of interest to the book blogging community and its followers, please let me know. I will happily share your news here with the fabulous array of bibliowonks who read this weekly wind up.

* Almost Overlooked *

Another week, another noteworthy post or two that came close to remaining unwound. (1) Worth a mention is Max Dunbar’s early August review of The Dark Side of the Sky for Shiny New Books in which he asks the question: “Can an apocalyptic cult ever be right?” Francesco Dimitri’s recently published fantasy, set in Southern Italy, is a tale of The Bastion, a “cool clique” of which everyone wants to be part. “Not, on the face of it, a regular cult”, every year it holds “wellness festivals featuring music, good food, wine and activities” and appears not to set a “trap” – but, for all that, the organisation won’t accept any old follower, merely a handful of discontented young people whom it deems “promising.” Told “in short, buzzy chapters”, the “book keeps us thinking and […] becomes very intense” towards the end. To find out why this story of “collective craziness and the allure of the magical” is so “compulsive”, please make your way over to The Dark Side of the Sky by Francesco Dimitri. (2) At the beginning of last month, in a post for She Reads Novels, Helen described Tales Accursed, a collection of sixteen supernatural stories, as varied in quality, of a similar structure and “slightly formulaic”. Nevertheless, there were some that “stood out”, not least ‘Woe Water’ by H.R. Wakefield and ‘Ancient Lights’ by Algernon Blackwood. All told, she “found the stories […] creepy or unsettling rather than frightening” but is still “interested in reading more by some of these authors.” You can find out why at Tales Accursed: A Folk Horror Anthology selected and illustrated by Richard Wells.

* Lit Crit Blogflash *

I am going to share with you one of my favourite posts from around the blogosphere. There are so many talented writers posting high-quality book features and reviews, it was difficult to pick only this one – which was published in the last week or so:

Fear and Paranoia in Literature – some sinister books for Halloween – In the run up to All Hallows’ Eve, Jacqui of JacquiWine’s Journal “put together a themed post on some favourite reads for the season.” However, since she finds “psychologically driven stories particularly unnerving,” she “widened the lens” beyond mere ghost tales to include “books in which fear, paranoia or trauma play a significant role.” Thus, we have Uncle Paul, Celia Fremlin’s “wonderfully compelling” 1959 thriller rubbing bony shoulders with the “sophisticated and richly imagined” but “unsettling collection”, The Ghost Stories of Edith Wharton and Patricia Highsmith’s “immersive story of obsession and desire”, This Sweet Sickness. All told, Jacqui presents us with a thoroughly spine-chilling choice of ten terrifying titles!

* Irresistible Items *

Umpteen fascinating articles appeared on my bookdar last week. I generally make a point of tweeting/x-ing (not to mention tooting and bsky-ing) a few favourite finds (or adding them to my Facebook group page), but in case you missed anything, there follows a selection of interesting snippets: 

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Publishers Weekly: Tarot, Oracle Decks are a Big Deal – “What if one could learn the future or discover fresh insights into the self from a deck of cards?” wonders Cathy Lynn Grossman in this piece on books about the classic tarot system. 

The Conversation: How the #MeToo movement has shaped how women write crime fiction – Alison Taft finds there are now several crime novels that specifically reference the #MeToo movement.

Minor Literature[s]: “Weird Tales continues to dominate pop culture to this day; Lovecraft, horror, science fiction, comics, those people all have Weird Tales in their DNA.”: An Interview with Eric Williams — Cristina Politano – “Eric Williams curated “several decades’ worth of short stories from the pulp magazine Weird Tales, an American publication that specialized in horror and fantasy fiction from 1923 until 1954”, resulting now in the publication of Night Fears: Weird Tales in Translation.

Electric Literature: Sapphic Undertones Littered L.M. Montgomery’s Fiction, as Well as Her Female Friendships – “The renowned author waged a constant battle between doing what was socially acceptable and being true to herself”, says Stephanie Sylverne.

The Monthly: Tomb reader – Melbourne-based author Andrea Goldsmith has a “lifelong love for the solitude of cemeteries [and regards] them as places full of life”.

The Villager: Why Don’t We Read Like We Used To? – While recovering from Covid, Tom Cox pondered his reasons for reading less these days.

Chytomo: The complex, enduring human spirit in Valerian Pidmohylnyi’s ‘The City’ – Anastasia Herasymova describes The City, the Ukrainian modernist Valerian Pidmohylnyi’s most famous novel (to be reissued in 2025) as an “emotional, deeply psychological story written in 1927” but “still relevant” today.

Bookforum: The Varieties of Mystical Experience – “Wouldn’t you like to be lifted up and out of yourself into a sheer feeling of aliveness?” asks Elvia Wilk. If so, you should read Mysticism, Simon Critchley’s “enjoyable new book”, in which, she says, you will discover “the love songs of Hadewijch of Antwerp, a thirteenth-century Christian mystic who wrote rapturous, erotic descriptions of receiving the Eucharist.”

CBC Books: Erica McKeen uses horror and surrealism to examine complicated grief and the tensions of providing care – “The Vancouver-based writer discussed her novel Cicada Summer [in a Q&A] with Mattea Roach.”

e-flux: The Paradox of the Nobel Prize in Literature – Alex Taek-Gwang Lee looks at how “cultural achievements become shared identity markers, turning individual triumphs into collective celebrations.”

Interview: Author Nate Lippens on Trauma Narratives and Serial Killers – “I love really intimate writing, or at least the illusion of diary or memoir,” the author of Ripcord tells Whitney Mallett. “But the novel frees you up.”

LA Times: How a Mexican-born debut novelist created a beautiful monster – This review written last year by Gabino Iglesias describes Gerardo Sámano Córdova’s Monstrilio as “an unearthly hybrid that’s part horror, part literary meditation on grief, part wildly entertaining tale of an impossible being forced to live in the shadow of the dead boy he replaced.”

The Moscow Times: Writing About War Without Writing About War – Andrei Muchnik looks at how contemporary Russian authors write fiction without ending up in jail.

SFFWorld: Where the Dead Brides Gather by Nuzo Onoh – Set in Nigeria, Where the Dead Brides Gather by ‘Queen of African Horror’ Nuzo Onoh has, according to Rob H. Bedford, “a great sense of place” and “packs quite a lot in its short page count”.

The Public Domain Review: “To Eat This Big Universe as Her Oyster” Margaret Fuller and the First Major Work of American Feminism – In this excerpt from Bright Circle: Five Remarkable Women in the Age of Transcendentalism, Randall Fuller “revisits the intellectual context, interviews with female prison inmates, and personal longing that informed [Margaret Fuller’s] landmark feminist work.”

City Journal: Scott Fitzgerald’s Last Act – “The author’s final, unfinished novel fused intimations of American decline with an encroaching sense of his own mortality”, says Jonathan Clarke.

China Books Review: Translated Chinese Literature: Story and History – Jack Hargreaves says of his list: “Five recent Chinese books in translation apply different prisms — pictures, poetry, fiction, memoir — to draw narratives out of complicated personal and political histories.”

Medievalists.net: New Medieval Books: The Stone Witch of Florence – “Set in Florence at the height of the Black Death, [The Stone Witch of Florence] tells the story of a woman who returns from banishment to help save the city and uncover a conspiracy.”

Public Discourse: The Bookshelf: Unputdownable – “Just as a thrilling novel can keep us turning the pages, our interest rising all the while, so a work of history, philosophy, science, or politics can startle us with revelations of the truth that make us keep reading just as urgently”, says Matthew J. Franck.

London Review of Books: A Walnut in Sacrifice – “Belief in a multitude of non-human entities, and in the ability of humankind to forge relationships with them via magical words and images – appears to be almost universal – and wherever these beliefs have co-existed with literacy, we find grimoires”, says Nick Richardson. Here he reviews Owen Davies’s Art of the Grimoire and David Rankine’s The Grimoire Encyclopedia: Volume 1 and Volume 2.

The Publishing Post: Shuffling of the Shelves – “If you didn’t start celebrating as early as possible, you can start now: it’s officially spooky season! Get cosy with a chilling thriller, an autumnal romance or something in between.”

Asian Review of Books: “The Silk Route Spy: The True Story of an Indian Double Agent” by Enakshi Sengupta – Reviewed here by Francis P Sempa, Enakshi Sengupta’s The Silk Route Spy is set in 1920s India during a period of revolt against colonial rule.

Book Riot: 10 Recent Works of Gothic Horror to Read ASAP – “These gothic horror books are more unsettling than outright terrifying, and many explore themes of loss, morality, and humanity,” says Addison Rizer.

Asymptote: Lillian Posner reviews Cecil the Lion Had to Die by Olena Stiazhkina – “Instead of Cecil, Stiazhkina directs our attention to the lives of regular, albeit fictional Ukrainians, from her hometown of Donetsk, which has been under Russian occupation since 2015”, writes Lillian Posner in her review of Cecil the Lion Had to Die.

Commonweal: A Deeper Order – George Scialabba on “Charles Taylor’s exploration of Romantic poetry”, Cosmic Connections: Poetry in the Age of Disenchantment.

Arts Hub: Book review: Shapeshifting: First Nations Lyric Nonfiction, Edited by Jeanine Leane and Ellen van Neerven – Syrian-Australian writer Mia Shouha describes Shapeshifting as a “powerful collection of lyric essays reshaping storytelling to reflect First Nations culture and history.”

World Literature Today: In Search of Ambivalent Horror: Mariana Enriquez on Rediscovering the Horrific in Everyday Injustices – Agnethe Brounbjerg Bennedsgaard talks to Argentine author Mariana Enriquez – “the uncrowned queen of new Latin American neogothic horror” – about recurring themes in her stories, real-life horror and connections between death and class.

Open Book: Celebrated Novelist Robert McGill Turns to Short Fiction to Examine Our Complicated World – Canadian novelist and non-fiction author Robert McGill discusses his new short story collection Simple Creatures, which “investigates how people live in the 21st century”.

Al Jazeera: Remembering Shamshad Abdullaev, the world-class Uzbek poet too few knew – “Dedicated to his art form, Abdullaev, who has died at 66 after battling cancer, was embraced by unorthodox artists in ex-Soviet republics”, recalls Mansur Mirovalev.

Jaylit: Harrowing Horrors: 10 Must-Read African Horror Books for Halloween – Bongiwe T. Maphosa dares you to join her on a journey “into all things dark and spooky in the African literary scene” and “explore where shadows linger and eerie whispers dance in the air”.

Smithsonian Magazine: This Savvy Librarian Was the True Force Behind New York’s Iconic Morgan Library – “Sonja Anderson explains just how it fell to Belle da Costa Greene, a Black woman whose racial identity was kept secret for decades, to catalog J.P. Morgan’s immense collection of books and art”.

The New Statesman: Remembering Paul Bailey – Leo Robson remembers Paul Bailey, “one of the pre-eminent English writers.”

AP News: Book Review: Richard Chizmar tells a creepy occult tale in ‘Memorials’ – Rob Merrill on Richard Chizmar’s Memorials, a supernatural tale set in 1983 when a group of students embark on a road trip through Appalachia.

The Guardian: Eliza Clark: ‘I don’t think we respect female writers’ – Hephzibah Anderson talks to Eliza Clark about her “first short story collection, She’s Always Hungry, a firecracker of a book that blends horror with speculative fiction and fantasy as it delves into themes of gender and power.”

Quillette: Reading Nietzsche in Amsterdam – “Lale Gül’s autobiographical novel [I Will Live] about a young Muslim woman living in the Netherlands has led to death threats and ostracism. But it is a work of admirable intelligence and courage”, finds Brad Strotten.

CrimeReads: There Will be Blood: The Potent Blend of Westerns & Horror – “There are so many things about the frontier era or the wild west that lend themselves to horror and thriller stories,” finds Lish McBride.

The National: Egyptian novelist Reem Bassiouney on the timeless appeal of Arabic historical fiction – According to author Reem Bassiouney, the historical novel “provides nuanced understanding of today’s world”. Saeed Saeed reports.

Aeon: Settling accounts – “Before he was famous, Jean-Jacques Rousseau was Louise Dupin’s scribe. It’s her ideas on inequality that fill his writings”, writes Rebecca Wilkin.

Ars Technica: Study: DNA corroborates “Well-man” tale from Norse saga – “The ‘Well-man’ likely had blue eyes, blond or light-brown hair, and hailed from southern Norway”, says Jennifer Ouellette.

Longreads: The Lessons of Lore – Elizabeth Friend believes that “ghost stories reveal our collective anxieties amid times of change.”

ABC News: The best new books released [last month], from an exploration of the past by Michelle de Kretser to Brian Castro’s 11th novel – October is always a blockbuster month in the Australian publishing industry and this year was no exception, with new offerings from Michelle de Kretser, Robbie Arnott, Melanie Cheng and more.

Creative Community for Peace: 1000+ Authors, Writers, Journalists, Publishers, and Entertainment Leaders Stand United Against Cultural Boycotts – Writers from around the globe including Lee Child, Simon Sebag Montefiore, Herta Müller, Ilya Kaminsky, Howard Jacobson, Lionel Shriver, David Mamet and many others have signed an open letter rejecting boycotts against authors and literary institutions.

Newsroom: Fleur, 1934-2024 – “Three writers pay tribute to [New Zealand poet and editor] Fleur Adcock, ‘that princess of quiet fire’”, who died following a short illness on 10^th October.

Wired: AI Slop Is Flooding Medium – “The blogging platform Medium is facing an influx of AI-generated content. CEO Tony Stubblebine says it ‘doesn’t matter’ as long as nobody reads it.”

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FINALLY >>

If there is something you would particularly like to see on Winding Up the Week or if you have any suggestions, questions, or comments for Book Jotter in general, please drop me a line or comment below. I would be delighted to hear from you.

Thank you for taking the time to read this post. I wish you a week bountiful in books and rich in reading.

NB In this feature, ‘winding up’ refers to the act of concluding something and should not be confused with the British expression: ‘wind-up’ – an age-old pastime of ‘winding-up’ friends and family by teasing or playing pranks on them. If you would like to know more about this expression, there is an excellent description on Urban Dictionary.

Categories: Winding Up the Week

Tags: All Hallows' Eve, Carrie Paris, Eliza Clark, Francesco Dimitri, Gerardo Sámano Córdova, Ghost Stories, Gothic Novels, Guy Fawkes Night, Halloween Reading, Horror Fiction, Nancy Hendrickson, Shirley Jackson, W.M. Cleese