Welcome to our eighth post about the Horror A Month Storygraph Reading Challenge. We are thrilled you are sticking with us and we are continuing to keep up with this challenge! This month we bring you some recommendations of humorous horror books. Let’s get started.
August Prompt: Dark Comedy
Discussion of the Prompt:
I was quite excited for this month’s prompt because I had John dies at the end by David Wong all set to start reading! However, the month got so busy that I felt like reading something more familiar rather than creating a whole new world in my mind. I finally ended up choosing and enjoying Pride and Prejudice and Zombies!
The idea of blending two seemingly different genres: horror and comedy, is a very intriguing concept to me. I expected to be laughing until I pause and realize I’m anxious with dread, or feeling dread until some humor cuts the tension. Sometimes, the absurdity of horror becomes the main theme or maybe a sarcastic joke in the face of terror is what this subgenre evokes. As a casual fan of the podcast, Welcome to Night Vale, I was interested to see what something so auditory could present in written form.
Ariel’s August Horror Read
Welcome to Night Vale by Joseph Fink & Jeffrey Cranor
(Find it on Storygraph and Goodreads)
Synopsis:
From the creators of the wildly popular Welcome to Night Vale podcast comes an imaginative mystery of appearances and disappearances that is also a poignant look at the ways in which we all struggle to find ourselves…no matter where we live.
Located in a nameless desert somewhere in the great American Southwest, Night Vale is a small town where ghosts, angels, aliens, and government conspiracies are all commonplace parts of everyday life. It is here that the lives of two women, with two mysteries, will converge.
Nineteen-year-old Night Vale pawn shop owner Jackie Fierro is given a paper marked “King City” by a mysterious man in a tan jacket holding a deer skin suitcase. Everything about him and his paper unsettles her, especially the fact that she can’t seem to get the paper to leave her hand, and that no one who meets this man can remember anything about him. Jackie is determined to uncover the mystery of King City and the man in the tan jacket before she herself unravels.
Night Vale PTA treasurer Diane Crayton’s son, Josh, is moody and also a shape shifter. And lately Diane’s started to see her son’s father everywhere she goes, looking the same as the day he left years earlier, when they were both teenagers. Josh, looking different every time Diane sees him, shows a stronger and stronger interest in his estranged father, leading to a disaster Diane can see coming, even as she is helpless to prevent it.
Diane’s search to reconnect with her son and Jackie’s search for her former routine life collide as they find themselves coming back to two words: “King City”. It is King City that holds the key to both of their mysteries, and their futures…if they can ever find it.
General Thoughts of Book
After reading Welcome to Night Vale, I realized I much preferred the podcast better. There are ways a tone or a pause or cadence in voice that presents this brand of humor very well; and for those not accustomed to the podcast may feel a little lost in the cryptic absurdity of the town of Night Vale. The story follows a mystery that was good but quite drawn out; I feel as though I would have preferred this book to be much shorter than it was. All in all I think that the funny moments were well done, but I’m sure there is a better representation of the horror-comedy blend elsewhere.
Kriti’s August Horror Read
Pride and Prejudice and Zombies by Jane Austen, Seth Grahame-Smith
(Find it on Storygraph and Goodreads)
Synopsis:
“It is a truth universally acknowledged that a zombie in possession of brains must be in want of more brains.”
So begins Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, an expanded edition of the beloved Jane Austen novel featuring all-new scenes of bone-crunching zombie mayhem. As our story opens, a mysterious plague has fallen upon the quiet English village of Meryton—and the dead are returning to life! Feisty heroine Elizabeth Bennet is determined to wipe out the zombie menace, but she’s soon distracted by the arrival of the haughty and arrogant Mr. Darcy. What ensues is a delightful comedy of manners with plenty of civilized sparring between the two young lovers—and even more violent sparring on the blood-soaked battlefield. Can Elizabeth vanquish the spawn of Satan? And overcome the social prejudices of the class-conscious landed gentry? Complete with romance, heartbreak, swordfights, cannibalism, and thousands of rotting corpses,
Content notes: Body horror, violence, gore, elopement, mention of infidelity.
General Thoughts of Book
I grew up reading Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen. There was just something about the story and the Indian retelling movie that I could not get it out of my mind. It has been years since I read it and this month seemed like the best chance I could get to revisit the old while experiencing something new. Pride and Prejudice and Zombies by Jane Austen and Seth Grahame-Smith is familiar but different.
Zombies have been in England for at least 50 years and people have learned to live with them – weapons like katanas and machetes are quite popular against them. The cast of the story has not changed, they have gotten deadlier with some zombies periodically causing havoc. Elizabeth Bennet was always a fierce heroine but now she is even stronger and I can totally see this side of her. Mr Bennet was also true to his character, letting the girls excel in dark arts, while keeping them somewhat in line with society. There was some gore (to be expected), some characters’ desire to eat brains (expected), a lot more hand-and-fists-legs-swords fighting and physical punishment between characters (unexpected, but fun) and mentions of infidelity (unexpected) in this book.
I have always loved Elizabeth and Darcy’s slow romance, built on misunderstanding, incomplete knowledge and presumptions. This slow burn romance, partly because of the era in which the story is set, and partly how different it is from our own reality, is exactly the reason why I love it so much. I also got to think more broadly about Pride and Prejudice and how the story was bigger than just Darcy and the two sister Bennets, who were always my focus in prior rereads.
It was an entertaining read overall and I had fun visiting old friends and reevaluating how they had changed.
Next month our prompt is all about your recommendations. Are there any horror books you love?
Thank you for joining us for yet another Horror a Month post! Look through all our horror reads at our Horror A Month Challenge home page.
Cover image: Photo on Unsplash
My favorite horrors will probably always be Interview with a Vampire and The Vampire Lestat. I also really liked Imaginary Friend by Stephen Chbosky, and pretty much any by Shirley Jackson.
Thank you for sharing your recommendations 🙂 We will check these out!