Welcome to our fifth post about the Horror A Month Storygraph Reading Challenge. Like before, we decided to pick up different books to give you some options for the prompt. We hope that you are enjoying this kind of discussion on the blog. 🙂
May Prompt: Classics
Discussion of the Prompt:
It has been so long since I have read classics. I tried Dracula first for this month and could not get into it. That era and style of writing takes some getting used to nowadays.
It has also been a long time since I’ve read a classic novel! It brings me back to academic analysis of classic literature– my brain works in overdrive for sure! This month for the prompt I picked Carmilla. A vampire classic I hadn’t read yet but wanted to; I was looking forward to what this book has to offer as a foundational read to European vampire lore.
Ariel’s May Horror Read
Carmilla by J. Sheridan Le Fanu
(Find it on Storygraph and Goodreads)
Synopsis:
When a mysterious carriage crashes outside their castle home in Styria, Austria, Laura and her father agree to take in its injured passenger, a young woman named Carmilla. Delighted to have some company of her own age, Laura is instantly drawn to Carmilla. But as their friendship grows, Carmilla’s countenance changes and she becomes increasingly secretive and volatile. As Carmilla’s moods shift and change, Laura starts to become ill, experiencing fiendish nightmares, her health deteriorating night after night. It is not until she and her father, increasingly concerned for Laura’s well-being, set out on a trip to discover more about the mysterious Carmilla that the terrifying truth reveals itself.
General Thoughts of Book
This book was written in a poetry prose, and it wasn’t very long, so it made it generally a quicker read. Much of the language is contemporary to the book’s original publication date (1872), so that in itself was a bit of a challenge for me but thankfully I was able to understand the majority of it. There are themes such as women’s sexuality, class difference, and connection. All of these are explored in the poetic way , and while this wasn’t a truly terrifying read, I can certainly appreciate the contributions this book made to vampiric lore we know of today.
Kriti’s May Horror Read
The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson
(Find it on Storygraph and Goodreads)
Synopsis:
First published in 1959, Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House has been hailed as a perfect work of unnerving terror. It is the story of four seekers who arrive at a notoriously unfriendly pile called Hill House: Dr. Montague, an occult scholar looking for solid evidence of a “haunting”; Theodora, his lighthearted assistant; Eleanor, a friendless, fragile young woman well acquainted with poltergeists; and Luke, the future heir of Hill House. At first, their stay seems destined to be merely a spooky encounter with inexplicable phenomena. But Hill House is gathering its powers—and soon it will choose one of them to make its own.
General Thoughts of Book
I saw the trailer for Netflix’s TV series of the same name and was interested in finding out how much it differed from the trailer. As expected, it was a whole other story. The Haunting of Hill House is about a group of people who are invited to stay in the house as part of a professor’s research. There is a creepy couple who act as caretakers of the mansion. The main character is Eleanor, one of the visitors, as she seems to develop a special connection with the house, seeing ghosts of memories past. We learn about the family fights that have happened over the house and the history of how it came to be. Most of the horror was left to my imagination as the book only had characters’ reactions to what they were experiencing, with no descriptions for what they could see. That made the book eerie and dark.Â
Closing Discussion for May Horror A Month
Next month our prompt is written by a LGBTQ author and we will be picking up two different books by the same author. Stay tuned!
Thank you for joining us for our fifth Horror a Month post! We look forward to bringing you some horror recommendations this year! If there are horror books you would recommend, please let us know in the comments. We will try to fit them into our prompts. See other horror recommendations on the Book Review Index.
Cover image: Photo on Unsplash
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