Books Set in Haunted Houses 🏚️🎃

  Hi everyone, I'm here today to talk to you about one of my favourite things and that is books that   have haunted and/or creepy houses in them. I had to allow creepy houses to be part of this video,   so books where houses feel like characters in the text but there aren't necessarily ghosts involved   or ghostly things because I feel like sometimes with haunted houses it's not necessarily ghosts   but it's the people who inhabit them who almost haunt them... whilst being alive,,,   does that make sense? Okay so this is not a definitive list of the best books out there   with haunted houses or the most popular so there's no Stephen King in here, there's no Susan Hill,   I've just pulled books off my shelves that I have enjoyed that fall into these categories   and I've kind of broken them down into sections, so first I'll talk to you about classic haunted   house type stories and by classic I don't necessarily mean old but that classic feeling of   'you're in a gothic setting, there's a pretty creepy house involved'   and then I've got some short story collections where haunted houses are at the centre,   I've got some graphic novels, some picture books, I've got a couple of non-fiction,   I also have some books where the haunting is more metaphorical or it is more fantastical/magical   realism based so I have pretty much something here for everyone — I even have a really cute book   about a haunted house, okay? [laughs] So no matter, as I said in the previous video,   no matter what your scare threshold is I've got you covered, so if you would like more   Halloween recommendations you can head over to my previous reading vlog too. I was reminded   to do this 1. because it's Halloween at the weekend and 2. because I have started reading   the Haunting of Hill House, it's been a while, I feel like I should have come to this sooner   but I've had a bit of a hit and miss relationship with Shirley Jackson's writing, I really enjoyed   We Have Always Lived in the Castle which I read a long time ago but I didn't love love it and then   I adore her short story the lottery but I didn't love the short story collection that is part of,   so it's been a while. This has been sitting on my shelf, now is the time. This is about a man who's   trying to investigate whether or not Hill House is haunted, so he invites a few people, some skeptics   and some people who believe in ghosts to come and stay in a Hill House for a while and they're going   to investigate the stories that have come out of it and see if any of it rings true and it says on   the back that it quickly descends into everybody's worst nightmare. I'm enjoying the writing so   far. I would also recommend the Little Stranger by Sarah Waters which is set in the 1950s, it's about   a doctor who keeps on being called out to this old manor house. His mother used to work there and the   family now are running out of money, people keep getting injured, something is just not quite right   and he's drawn in by their charm but also by the mystery of it. It's really slow paced and I very   much enjoyed that one I'd also recommend both of these books by John Harding, the first of them   is Florence and Giles. This is about the nanny of Florence and Giles who has suffered a horrible   violent death and their new governess has arrived but Florence believes that the new governess is   there to cause her harm so she thinks she better hurt her first, just to be on the safe side.   One of those cases where it's a creepy house and it's the alive people who are doing the haunting.   It says on the front imagine the Turn of the Screw reworked by Edgar Allan Poe and I think that's a   very accurate way of looking at it. I'd also recommend this book which is a gothic thriller   set in the 1890s it's about a doctor who's been called to this isolated women's asylum   where a woman can read when she shouldn't be able to read and no one really knows why.   It gives me Shutter Island vibes. If we're looking for gothic old house I would also recommend The   Book Collector by Alice Thompson, this is about a woman called Violet who marries someone that she   doesn't really know that well and when she gets to his house which is beautiful but ancient and   she's not really allowed to touch anything, she realizes that his first wife, who was called Rose,   died and she's wondering why he's collecting women who have the names of flowers, why he wants women   to be ornamental, and why she's not allowed to look at the book that he keeps looked inside his   safe. Tanglewreck by Jeanette Winterson is a book that has an eerie house in it where time slips and   things are not quite what they seem, it's about a young girl called Silver who's noticed that   time tornadoes have been tearing through the country and if you're not careful you can slip   in a puddle and end up in a whole different period. It says 'the world is in trouble,   nobody knows what to do, some days are long some days are short, time stops and then jerks forward.   Silver lives with her bony bad-tempered aunt and hears strange stories about the timekeeper, an   alchemist swatch that could steady time again, if anybody could only find it' and she lives in this   strange old house which is called Tanglewreck. The whole book is not set in the house but I remember   loving this house when I read it, it is middle grade but I read it as an adult and really enjoyed   it. I have a few books here that use hauntings to explore grief and trauma so this is grief is the   thing with feathers by max porter and I would say it is about a haunted house because it's about a   woman, a wife, a mother who dies she's left behind her husband and two sons and their grief manifests   and materializes as this huge crow that barges its way into their house and won't stop taunting them,   haunting them, saying if they just are good enough maybe their mother will come back. it's a really   horrible, true, nasty look at what grief does to us when we lose someone that we love. something   that isn't nasty but is magical and is exploring what could have happened if someone hadn't died   is the white book by han kang which is translated from the korean by deborah smith.   in this she is writing into existence her sister and her brother who she never got to meet because   they passed away when they were born, so this is a haunting in the sense that she's bringing them   to life as these ghostly figures but it's it's not a scary book in any way shape or form. I just   wanted to include lots of different haunted house stories and this is her just bringing   ghosts into existence in her house for comfort and I think that that was really   really well done. I also wanted to recommend ruby by cynthia bond and also sing unburied sing by   jesmyn ward, both of which are inspired by beloved by toni morrison, and all three of these books   use both the haunting of houses and the haunting of selves to talk about inherited trauma, to   talk about racial injustice and to talk about the history of slavery, some of these characters breed   ghosts themselves and some of them cannot escape their pasts no matter how far they travel or or no   matter what period in time they find themselves in, they all use that magical realism to great   effect. one hundred shadows by hwang jungeun is translated from the korean by jung yewon and this   i'm stretching a little bit because the houses are not necessarily the things being haunted, though   often the characters are within the houses, this is about a group of characters in seoul in korea   who work in the electronics industry, they've been downtrodden by society and then one day   their shadows break free of themselves in a peter pan type way, and demand that they follow them,   so it's like they're haunted by themselves but the haunting is this uprising and i'm reading this one   at the moment and really enjoying it. a nonfiction book i wanted to mention is ghost of the tsunami   by richard lloyd parry. this is a non-fiction book that was written after the fukushima disaster in   2011. richard was living in tokyo at the time and he travels to the surrounding areas and he speaks   to locals about their experience of ghosts, of hauntings in their houses since the disaster,   and the folklore that started to emerge out of that about potential survivors. pet by akwaeke   emezi is a book that I read a couple of months ago and i loved it. this falls into the creepy house   I'm not sure it's necessarily haunted though it does have another being within it. this is   a world where demons are thought to no longer exist, everyone's managed to get rid of them,   monsters have gone, but then one day pet's mother's painting comes to life and says there is   a monster and we need to go and find it, so it has that element of things coming to life from objects   which I really like in haunted houses stories, but this is something more than that. I also recently   read D a tale of two worlds by Michel Faber which is a middle grade book about a young girl called   Dikkilo who has to travel to a different world to save the letter D from the alphabet because   it's been stolen. I t's inspired by james thurber and also the wizard of oz, alice in wonderland,   and also dickens, and there is a specific scene in this book which is just the best haunted house,   it's called bleak house and it's a hotel, and when you go into it,   the hotel basically eats you and will not let you go, you wander into different rooms, the wallpaper   is alive and keeps replicating itself and signs appear everywhere, it turns into this horrible   nightmarish maze, i loved it, that was my favorite part of this book. then let me see where i should   go from here... let's go to short stories this is other stories and other stories by ali smith   and in this there is a story called 'the hanging girl' and the narrator is walking and wherever   she walks, wherever she goes in her house, she can always see a hanging girl behind her, it's really   really creepy. I also wanted to recommend the other world whispers by stephanie victoire which   I read a long time ago and has several haunting stories in it. this is outsiders an anthology   edited by alice slater and in this we've got a story by savat hasin which is called.... what is   it called? the lady is not for burning, and it's about a haunted house, a racist haunted house and   the ghost that haunts this house is outraged that someone has moved into this house who isn't white,   and this ghost is going to cause havoc, it is an amazing short story. I also love the collection   as a whole. If you would like some old school ghost stories, gentle ghost stories, haunted house   stories, you might enjoy Weird Woods which is a collection published by the british library and   you might enjoy Weird Women, classic supernatural fiction by groundbreaking female writers from 1852   to 1923. Several of these are about haunted houses and might I recommend my short story collection,   the beginning of the world in the middle of the night, one of the stories in this collection is   called aunt libby's coffin hotel and is about a hotel on an island in the middle of a lake   run by aunt libby and her niece ankaa and you can go there and pay a fee to be transported to   the world of the dead. everybody there sleeps in coffins. not all is what it seems. you may also   want to check out the short story anthology eight ghosts which was commissioned by english heritage   and they asked authors like max porter and sarah perry to pick an english heritage site,   go and stay there for the night, and then write a ghost story inspired by that old building. I   thought it was a brilliant, brilliant premise. I also wanted to quickly mention two books that   I read this month hoping that I could include them as books that i love about haunted houses,   but I didn't love them, though I recognize so many people do, and will if they read them,   so i'm going to include them but with the caveat that I didn't love them but you might like them   if you like these specific things, so this is mexican gothic by silvia moreno garcia.   i was so excited about this book, it's set in 1950s mexico, and it's about a woman who is called   to the house of her cousin, and she has written saying that she doesn't feel safe with her husband   and something strange is going on, so noemi goes to this huge manor house to investigate what's   happening. the dialogue didn't feel particularly realistic to me and it just didn't feel   precise enough, I think; it didn't have as much atmosphere as I wanted it to,   I just wasn't swept up in the way that I wanted to be swept up. I think if you prefer   more YA-type writing that is heavier on the dialogue then I would recommend this one to you.   and then I also read the knife drawer by padrika tarrant. the writing in this is so beautiful,   i cannot get over it, let me just give you an example of that 'the lives of houses are ruinously   long next to the lives of people. although the hearts of houses are strong, they are terribly   slow, the heart of a house beats only four times a year and every pulse takes a whole weekend.   the infrasonic sound is loud enough to frighten dogs, audible only in migraines.   a creature is pinned in time by sadness and houses are the tiredest, oldest,   saddest things there are. this makes their lives very long. nothing is sadder than a very old house   staring backwards through history at the kilns and quarries of its making.' I mean that just brings   a smile to my face ,I so wanted to love this book but the way that this book talks about disability   just made me really really sad, this is a house where the inanimate objects come to life, the   spoons come to life and the mice are people-like in this house, and the mice witness the woman   of the house murder her husband, and then the teaspoons eat the husband and the mice keep on   breeding, and this talks about them being inbred, a lot of them having disabilities and they call   the disabled mice "the singing mice" because they love evil so much and they just want to die,   and one of those mice has albinism and her mother thinks of her as a monster.   I really found it really upsetting. I've talked about disfigurement/disability and villainy,   I'll link those videos down below, so this was just a no-go from me, but if that kind of thing   doesn't upset you then the writing in this is so good and I so wish those elements weren't   there so that I could enjoy the rest of that book. other creepy houses books and going back to books   that I love, this is the bass rock by evie wyld, which is my favourite book of the year so far,   it's going to take something extra, extra special to top this book, it's set in three different time   periods the 1700s the 1950s and the present day and it's all set around one house next to   the bass rock in scotland and it's about how women are treated in different time periods   and how they are called out as witches for lots of different things, maybe for their sexuality   or for their behavior, or in the case of the middle narrative of Ruth married in the 1950s,   she is a stepmother and she's vilified for that. english animals by laura kaye is one of   my favorite books of all time ,it's about a woman called Mirka who's moved from slovakia to the uk   and she goes to work at this creepy old english manor which is owned by a couple called richard   and sophie. she thought she was being hired as their nanny but they don't have any children   and she gets roped into their taxidermy business instead. it is about old english heritage and how   that manifest and turns into horrible things, it's about xenophobia, it's about homophobia and it's   just so fascinating/ i recorded a podcast with laura which i will link in the description box   down below. i'd also recommend bitter orange by claire fuller which is set in 1969 and the present   day about a woman called frances who has been hired to do an inventory of all these antiques   in this old house, and when she gets there a couple is already living and working there,   who are called cara and peter, they sleep in the room below her but there's a hole in the   floor so she spies on them all the time and she becomes completely infatuated with them   and there's something about the house and the secrets that the house holds that makes her   feel as though she can act in a way that she probably wouldn't if she was anywhere else.   a couple of graphic novels. this is locke and key which is by joe hill and gabriel rodriguez   I actually much prefer the tv show which is not something that I actually normally say   when it comes to books but I think maybe it's the art style in this, I just love the premise,   it's about a house where you can use different keys to access other worlds but also you can   access places within yourself so you can use one of the keys to open up your head and then you can   walk around your own head like it is a building and everyone's head building looks different. it's   magical, this comic book, it reminds me in style of the walking dead. it's that kind of art style.   I'd also recommend the oracle code which is by Marieke Nijkamp, this is set in the batman   universe but you need no knowledge of that at all, it's about barbara gordon who's a hacker she   has had an accident and she is now a wheelchair user she's been taken to a rehabilitation centre   to get used to using her wheelchair and in this rehabilitation centre she meets lots of other   children who have disabilities, the representation in this is great, and then she starts to hear   creepy stories of things that are going on in this rehabilitation centre and are they ghost stories,   is this place haunted, or is there something real going on? the sleeper and the spindle by   neil gaiman and illustrated by chris riddell is not necessarily a haunted house story but   it's a retelling of sleeping beauty and snow white and snow white goes to rescue sleeping beauty and   when she gets to the castle instead of everyone having been put to sleep for a hundred years,   everyone has been put to sleep for 100 years but as a zombie, so the castle is not full of ghosts   but is full of zombies, instead. when i arrived at the castle by emily carroll is my favorite of her   work. this is a queer graphic novel about a girl who goes to this blue beard type castle. I will   insert my history of bluebeard fairytale up here and down below, and she is seduced by this woman   who ...I'm trying to find a page that I can show you because it's quite sexy in here, she   is seduced by this woman who wants to ravage her in more ways than one. if you know the   bluebeard fairy tale then then you know. this is a graphic novel by audrey niffenegger who wrote   the time traveler's wife and her fearful symmetry this is the first book she ever wrote,   i think, when she was at art school and it's called the adventuress, it's very sparse,   it's not for everybody, each page has one image that she's drawn and then a couple of lines of   text. it's about a woman who's manufactured by a man and then is stolen away by a baron, and when   she gets to his castle it's a very, very creepy place indeed let me find you an image of that,   I don't know if you can see that she's in a house but there are lots of eyes in the background,   'so she found herself then, in a church, amid a sea of eyes and this was their wedding'.   Finally I promised you a cute book, I promise you a cute haunting book so this is one of my   favourite halloween books ever, it's called how to make friends with a ghost by rebecca green   and it's what happens if you find a ghost that's living in your house and you would   like to befriend it. it's an instruction guide, it tells you what they wear, where they like to go,   whether or not they like to go to the park and what games they like to play, what food they   like to eat ,what stories they like to be told at bedtime, so that they do't have nightmares,   there's even recipes in here so that you can cook your ghost its favorite food, it's just the most   adorable thing you have ever seen in your life. so those are all the books that i wanted to recommend   today, of course creepy houses and classics: rebecca, jane eyre etc all the classic books ever   but these are the ones i specifically wanted to talk to you about today, let me know what your   favorite haunted house/creepy house stories are in a comment down below because i would love to know.   i hope you're all doing okay and i'll speak to you very soon, lots of love, bye