Six Degrees: Turn of the Screw & Other Spooky Things

It’s time for #6degrees. Start at the same place as other wonderful readers, add six books, and see where you end up. Inspired by the Six Degrees of Separation Meme hosted every month at Books are my Favorite and Best.

October 2020’s book is The Turn of the Screw by Henry James.

^{A very young woman’s first job: governess for two weirdly beautiful, strangely distant, oddly silent children, Miles and Flora, at a forlorn estate…An estate haunted by a beckoning evil. Half-seen figures who glare from dark towers and dusty windows- silent, foul phantoms who, day by day, night by night, come closer, ever closer. With growing horror, the helpless governess realizes the fiendish creatures want the children, seeking to corrupt their bodies, possess their minds, own their souls… But worse-much worse- the governess discovers that Miles and Flora have no terror of the lurking evil. For they want the walking dead as badly as the dead want them.}

What better book than Turn of the Screw for this Halloween month? Incidentally, since I am also participating in the 2020 Readers Imbibing Peril (R.I.P.) XV challenge this month, here are six spooky reads, all following up from Turn of the Screw.

First up is The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794) by Ann Radcliffe, which I reviewed here previously. In Udolpho, young Emily St. Aubere finds herself orphaned and in the clutches of her wicked uncle-in-law, Montoni. Montoni is up to no good, and more than one skeleton hides in his closet. This is Gothic suspense at its finest, and is highly recommended.

My second recommendation is Edgar Allan Poe’s Tales of Mystery and Terror (1849). Poe is the master of the morbid and the lurid. I own a very old edition of Poe’s Tales of Mystery and Terror, which has amazing graphite illustrations too.

The Fall of the House of Usher from that collection is no exception. The scene where the sister who had been buried alive comes awake to avenge herself is positively spine-chilling. (Trailer of a recent animation above.)

The third book is House of Salt and Sorrows (2019) by Erin A. Craig, which took me completely by surprise. It is a very spooky retelling of The Twelve Dancing Princesses, and gives that old folktale a sea-folk / mer-folk twist. There are curses and ghostly visions and ghastly bargains as Annaleigh’s house starts to crumble. I genuinely had to keep myself from reading it at night. Brr.

Fourth item in this chain is a poem, The Listeners (1968) by Walter de La Mare. It is hair-raising and quite appropriate for this Halloween season. Quoting a resounding stanza from that poem below:

^{But no one descended to the Traveller;
No head from the leaf-fringed sill
Leaned over and looked into his grey eyes,
Where he stood perplexed and still.
But only a host of phantom listeners
That dwelt in the lone house then
Stood listening in the quiet of the moonlight
To that voice from the world of men}

Fifth in this series is a short story, Mr. Sardonicus (1955) by Ray Russell. Ever heard of risus sardonicus? Once upon a time, exhuming dead bodies was gravely blasphemous (pun intended!). One grave-robber ended up digging out his own father’s dead body. Since then, his face became locked-up in an extremely sinister expression. Sardonicus thinks this is a case of rigor mortis. But as this story will tell you, your mind is the Unknowable and it can make you believe just about anything. Trailer for the 1961 movie is at YouTube.

Sixth and last mention goes to Tim Burton’s Sleepy Hollow (1999). It veers off from Washington Irving’s The Legend of Sleepy Hollow (1820) in remarkable ways. While the book proposes that the Supernatural is only a sham played out by swindling humans, the movie says otherwise. A headless hunter is decapitating members of an aristocratic family of the small Dutch colony town of Sleepy Hollow. The hunter, it appears, is searching for his own lost skull that has been stolen. Nobody does the odd, comic, surreal, wise, spooky and innovative — all combined — better than Burton. Seriously, a classic for all times.