Two things: Yes, we’re back to Ghost. (In retrospect, this seems fitting for today’s picks, which, unusually, are all horror/thriller—but not all very scary!!) I sighed in commiseration when I saw that Lindsey Adler did the same thing I'd done earlier this year—tried to move from Substack to Ghost and quickly returned because the user experience here is so opaque and unintuitive. It is!! I would not broadly recommend it! But I needed a project (and had already paid for the “Pro” tier) so I’ve made it work. That said, even while using the turnkey setup, I’ve needed to inject a decent amount of code which I’ve managed by pulling whatever I remember from my LiveJournal days, teaching myself via W3Schools, and going through hours of trial and error. The site will look janky for a bit. I guarantee if any actual coders looked behind the scenes they would be horrified. It’s very fun!!
Also: I went to a Zohran Mamdani rally on Monday and I can’t stop thinking about it. It was my first political rally and though I’ve historically been VERY resistant to placing too much hope in a politician, wary of lionizing anyone in power, it was impossible to sit in the crowd and not feel like we are on the brink of some kind of revolution. It was a whirlwind, and now I kind of see how easy it would be for me to fall into a cult. Not that I think this is a cult! But I would bet there’s a not insignificant overlap in the skills of politicians and cult leaders. That said, it did (and does) feel like a historic moment and I do have a lot (vis-à-vis my sanity) riding on his winning. We need something to believe in, and right now it’s the possibility of a lifeline. There was a lot of love in that theater, and you could feel it.
Now, some recs, which I am ranking on a scaredy-cat (not derogatory) scale: 1 cat is, like, this is dark but it probably won't give you nightmares; 5 is you might have to sleep with the lights on.
Reading
The Haunting of Room 904 by Erika T. Wurth
About five pages into Erika Wurth’s latest horror, I DMed her to ask if she’d be open to an interview for this very newsletter. (Watch this space). There is so much I’m itching to dive into, not least of all what she addresses in the disclaimer at the start: that this novel “deals with suicide (specifically as to Indian Country).” One of the most illuminating and enraging facts that I discovered during research for Better was the omission of Indigenous populations in most studies, despite their being the demographic with the highest rates of suicide in the US. This blurb isn’t about Better but I was excited to see how this epidemic would be woven into, and deepen, what otherwise appeared to be a classic ghost story. It’s done beautifully.
Denver-based Olivia Becente is a well-known and successful paranormal investigator with no shortage of job requests. She received the gift after her sister—whose abilities as a seer Olivia had always doubted—died ostensibly by suicide. The book opens with a case that goes haywire when Olivia releases a furious spirit from a dybbuk box that turns out to be Nese, a sacred two-spirit member of the Cheyenne tribe who was tortured and killed in the Sand Creek Massacre. From that point Nese’s experience of the massacre is told in brief vignettes alongside a collision of multiple missions: Olivia must solve the mysteries of her sister’s death, the haunting of a local hotel, and the connection between both mysteries and Nese. In less skilled hands, at least a few of the heavy topics Wurth explores—mental illness, misogyny, gender and queerness, anti-immigrant fervor, the Native American genocide and its legacy of generational trauma, reparations—might seem gratuitous, but here they work perfectly. They make sense. The result is a blend of history and horror, as poignant as it is scary. Rating: 🐱 🐱 🐱 🐱
Buy it: print/digital or audio.
Deep Water by Patricia Highsmith
The goat! Vic Van Allen is a strangely endearing middle-aged man living by an un-self-righteous ethic of justice—he’s inherited great wealth but shares it widely because he knows his good fortune is arbitrary; he fundamentally believes he has no right to limit another person’s agency—who, for this very reason, has an unspoken agreement with his wife, Melinda, that she can keep various boyfriends. His only problem is the men she chooses. Why can't she invite men into their home who are smart, interesting, curious about art and politics—in other words, men whose company he can also enjoy? When a particularly unserious (and very drunk) boyfriend approaches Vic at a party and breaks the "open secret" rule by telling him he’s such a “brick” for being “so nice about my seeing your wife,” Vic decides to mess with him by telling him he’s responsible for the still unsolved murder of Melinda's former beau. He gets so high on this man's reaction—an unease that’s strong enough for him to stop seeing Melinda—that he decides to tell the same story to her next boyfriend. This time it spreads throughout the town and he finds himself surprisingly pleased by their fear—whether they believe he did it or just think he’s strange enough to want people to believe he did—as well as his wife’s new monogamy. It all comes crumbling down when another man confesses to the murder. Now that same story, and his wife’s return to new lovers, makes him pathetic. A beta cuck, if you will. He got a taste of the alpha life and he doesn’t want to lose it. So! He kills a new boyfriend. (This is not a spoiler; it’s in the back cover blurb.)
Patricia Highsmith is so good at getting into the psyches of her characters, and Vic is so strange, compelling, and funny that it’s hard not to be on his side, especially in her depiction of his relationship with his daughter. (Poor Trixie, for real.) He’s a man who uses the time afforded by his wealth on endeavors like launching a small press or studying bed bugs in his garage because he thinks “a certain entomologist who wrote a piece for an entomologist journal is wrong about a certain point in their reproductive cycle.” He’s awesome! Melinda sucks! Her dudes are awful! The murder is understandable! Rating: 🐱
Buy it: print/digital or audio.
Midnight Timetable: A Novel in Ghost Stories by Bora Chung
I read this book in one sitting. I don't think I've ever read anything quite like it. I was intrigued by the subtitle—how would this be different from a collection of linked stories?—but the key is the clear, purposeful, underlying plot. Over the course of one overnight shift, an unnamed new employee at "the institute"—whose job is making sure the doors to the many mysterious rooms remain locked—listens as their manager shares the histories of former employees and the contents behind those doors. Each room houses a single haunted object carrying a specific trauma. Imagine sitting around the fire during an episode of Are You Afraid of the Dark? It’s like that.
One might assume the “researchers” at this institute are studying the ghosts themselves, probing trapped souls for personal gain—and to be honest, that would still be great. But Chung amplifies the themes of the stories by slowly revealing it's actually a place dedicated to freeing these spirits. These are ghost stories but also parables of hubris, greed, and cruelty: abusive men and their uncontrollable rage, power-hungry researchers with no regard for their test subjects, a coddled son obsessed with the only object his late mother didn’t leave him. On the flip side, we learn about a queer man who survived conversion therapy, whose one-time haunting is a necessary catharsis on his way to happiness. Contemplating their role at the institute and its work, the employee is “hoping I can bring a little bit of consolation to those who are most vulnerable, be they shadows under the sun.” The idea that ghosts might be terrifyingly powerful and vulnerable at the same time: I cried! Rating: 🐱 🐱 🐱
Buy it: print/digital or audio.
The Colorado Kid by Stephen King
This is getting long, but luckily there’s not much that needs to be said here. It’s a short and sweet, classic whodunnit—signalled by the pulpy cover illustration that pulled me toward it to begin with—with a touch of the supernatural. It’s irreverent and readable and hard to put down. In other words, it’s Stephen King. It takes place in a small coastal Maine town, where the three sole workers at the local newspaper—two rough-edged old-timers and a hungry intern—try to solve the cold case of a John Doe found dead on a beach. There isn’t a deeper meaning. It’s very fun. King wrote this in 2005 for Hard Case Crime, an indie publisher of both out-of-print and original “hard-boiled crime fiction” (obsessed with them and their website) and it’s back in print for the first time in a decade. It was also adapted into the SyFy series Haven which I somehow hadn’t heard of despite it running for five years? And which I will probably watch now. Ranking: 🐱 🐱
Buy it: print/digital or audio.
Watching
- High Potential: This show is everything I want from a murder procedural: an unlikely fish-out-of-water savant (Kaitlin Olsen, love her), wacky graphics to signal “she's putting together the pieces...,” a will they/won't they with a hot, emotionally unavailable partner (Daniel Sunjata), slo-mo episode conclusions that take themselves very seriously, and at least one “you’re going to want to see this” per episode. And as bonuses: Judy Reyes as the tough but fair captain, Taran Killam as a feckless but supportive ex-husband, and a surprisingly phenomenal soundtrack?? (The pilot opens with Gossip!)
- Literally any and everything I can find about the Dan Markel murder case. Fixated on Rob Adelson. Can you imagine moving away from your insane family and then, years later, having to return to Miami because you need to testify that they definitely killed your former brother-in-law? This poor man.
Playing
- Tiny Bookshop: An addictive cozy management game about running a mobile bookshop in the small town of Bookstonbury (hehe). You make friends, have side missions, expand your inventory, and—most fun—get to recommend real books to customers based on their specific requests. You can get those recs wrong and make those customers briefly annoyed! There is no consequence for this. I’m interviewing the creators for LitHub’s blog. Shout-out to Katie Heaney for the recommendation.