This was September.

Mystery James Digs Her Own Grave by Ally Russell. Get yourself pals who write excellent spooky stories—your reading life will be infinitely more interesting. This was great! I enjoyed it a lot, although not quite as much as I did Russell’s first endeavor (It Came From the Trees positively crackled with urgent, exhilarating energy, whereas this one feels mildly meandering). Still, there’s plenty to love here. “Plenty” being the operative word, because there are so many things going on in this story: sleep paralysis and ghosts and phantosmia and mortuary lessons and grave robbing and vampires and—! It should be entirely too much for any one author to handle, but Russell does an admirable job pulling all these seemingly disparate threads together by the end. (Knowing this is the first part of a duology certainly helps, since it means more room for these distinct themes to further coalesce.)

I continue to love seeing Russell’s deep-rooted found-footage horror influences play out: glitching ghosts make for a wonderfully terrifying visual, and the notebook interludes between chapters do a lot in terms of world-building, as well as being, you know, just plain fun. 

While I may not have found the plot of Mystery James as strong as that of her debut, Russell has clearly leveled up her character work—which is saying something, since it was already the strongest aspect of Trees. The supporting cast (from best friend Garrett to Tía Lucy to newfound acquaintance Eliza) all feel like real, rounded, grounded people, and Mystery herself is simply an immediate icon—which, of course, was the goal. In the acknowledgements, Russell writes about wanting to create a character who would not only fit seamlessly into the pantheon of iconic ghoulish girls—alongside Wednesday Addams, Fiona Phillips, and Lydia Deetz—but also give young Black and Brown girls a chance to “see themselves through her supernatural lens.” In that sense, Mystery James—the graveyard girl who smells ghosts and lives in a funeral home and keeps spiders in her hair—is a resounding success.

Amphigorey Also by Edward Gorey. Another perfectly inscrutable collection from a perfectly inscrutable individual. I didn’t find it as strong as the first Amphigorey volume, but it’s definitely wilder and weirder (which is saying something). There’s a lot here, I think, that made sense to only Gorey himself, if at all (which is, of course, how he would have liked it). The more “traditional” (for lack of a better word) little books are, naturally, perfectly intricate and fastidious affairs. Among my favorites: The Epiplectic Bicycle (a splendidly stark selection of increasingly surreal non-sequiturs); Les Passementeries Horribles (oddly ominous and exceptionally eldritch); L’heure Bleue (a strikingly stylistic, delightful doggerel); The Awdry-Gore Legacy (a marvelously meta, murderous manuscript); The Glorious Nosebleed (another absurdly amusing abecedarium); The Loathsome Couple (a lugubrious and lurid little lay); The Stupid Joke (a terrifically terrible tale); The Prune People (mesmerically Magrittean); The Tuning Fork (an uncanny, nautical narrative). 

We love Edward Gorey in this house.

Written Lives by Javier Marías, Margaret Jull Costa (translator). An okay but deeply amusing read for me. In the prologue, Marías writes about his intention to treat these large literary legends as mostly fictional figures, given that most were long dead and their biographies burdened with embellishments. In this way, I suppose I’m the ideal reader for this book, as I had only a passing knowledge, if any, of many of the distinguished dignitaries discussed in this slim volume, and so their eventful, fanciful, often extravagant lives would have read like fantastic fiction to me regardless.

In a lot of ways, Written Lives reads like a modern, more literary version of Plutarch’s Lives, sharing that classical volume’s penchant for brief biographies that are as full of sensational gossip and racy rumors as they are of irrefutable facts. This, as you might imagine, makes for a fun and fairly flippant read—but also an unexpectedly poignant one at times—since by going with this fictionalized approach, Marías actually ends up humanizing his beloved scribes with all their elaborate, likely imagined foibles and follies. It’s funny how that works.

Anyway, the entries I enjoyed most were curiously about the figures I knew next to nothing about (Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa, Madame du Deffand, Vernon Lee). But it’s the final section—a sort of impromptu epilogue where Marías “reviews” the portraits of celebrated writers he’s collected over the years, drawing increasingly ludicrous and improbable conclusions from the tiniest, most arbitrary details—that I found most fascinating. More than in the preceding biographies, it’s in this segment that Marías’s genuine, almost idealistic impressions of these literary luminaries shine through, and it’s a delight to read.

Bad Dreams in the Night by Adam Ellis. I’m a huge fan of Ellis’s horror work. It often feels timeless, like early internet creepypastas or classic urban legends, but then Ellis will add these touches of modernity—present-day tech, matter-of-fact representation, contemporary colloquialisms—that make his stories feel much more immediate and engaging. Ellis’s art continues to amaze. When I first started following his work many moons ago, it leaned toward the “typical” webcomic style of the time, but has since evolved into something far more intricate and nuanced. His ability to emulate a myriad of aesthetics and moods—from Ito-esque manga to found-footage films to even Victorian-era penny dreadfuls—will never not be impressive. Great stuff. Favorites: “Me and Evangeline at the Farm,” “Bus Stop,” and the brilliantly creepy closer, “Viola Bloom.” 

And that was September. I had grand plans for October, let me tell you, but to be perfectly honest, now that it’s finally here, I find myself not feeling things at all this year. So this Halloween month may be more muted than you might have come to expect from this humble horror reader. Still, I hope to get through at least a few ghastly books this haunting season. We’ll see.

BOOKS BOUGHT—A GALLIMAUFRY:

• No Country for Old Men by Cormac McCarthy
• So Many Books: Reading and Publishing in an Age of Abundance by Gabriel Zaid
• Mystery James Digs Her Own Grave by Ally Russell
• Amphigorey Too by Edward Gorey