This week’s prompt is a Halloween freebie, of course. As anyone who’s been around here for a while knows, I don’t do scary, I don’t do creepy, I definitely don’t do horror because it’s both. So Halloween prompts are always a bit of a challenge because what can I really add to the conversation? So this time I’m doing a few sort of in the ballpark ideas. Let’s see if they’re any good, shall we?
Books featuring fantastical beings
Somewhere Beyond the Sea by T.J. Klune
Legends & Lattes by Travis Baldree
Okay, so these are all pretty adorable, but they are the closest I get to any kind of fantasy book, and some of those are Halloweeny….. right? But mostly they’re just really, really enjoyable reads. You know, when you’ve scared yourself silly and need something decidedly comforting.
Books that scared me
The Salt Path by Raynor Winn
The Myth of Normal by Gabor Maté and Daniel Maté
The Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank
Alone Together ed. Jennifer Haupt
Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates
So none of these are scary in the traditional sense, but honestly in a lot of ways these books scare me more than ghosties and ghoulies and things that go bump in the night, because while those ideas freak me completely out, I also don’t believe in any of them being real. These, on the other hand, discuss things in our real world that are, in one way or another, pretty scary. We’ve got sudden and severe mental illness, loss of life savings and a home, trauma and stigma surrounding mental illness/difference, the Holocaust, the state of the medical system in the UK (but it’s not any better where I am), the early days of the pandemic and the effects of racism paired with being a parent. Any one of these will have you facing things you’ll find deeply uncomfortable and would quite frankly prefer not to deal with. But all excellent book all the same.
Okay, that’s it for me this week – a different take on what chills and terrorizes our psyches! What did you guys do for this week’s freebie? Anyone else take a more literal twist on the theme of fear?
Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly link-up feature created by The Broke and the Bookish and hosted by Jana at That Artsy Reader Girl. Every week TTT has a different topic, and everyone who links up has to create a link of ten items that fit that topic. To see past and upcoming topics, go here.
