 | | Turn the Lights Down Low... | ...let's get spooky... Hello lovely readers, and welcome to our special Halloween edition of the newsletter. This week, I have some creepy fairy tales to get you in the mood for frights, some chilling novellas, and some near-forgotten movie gems! Not only that, we're taking a step back, and looking at the roots of horror, and how it has been embraced by the marginalized in society! And, possibly scariest of all...we have a new book by Cormac McCarthy! cue the blood-curdling scream But, lest we scare you too much, we have out regular book picks, we have a piece from Dave about some titles he's excited about, and so much more, so let's dive in, shall we? | Picks from Words Worth Every two weeks, in time for the newsletter, we will be highlighting books that get us really pumped. We won't limit ourselves to just brand new titles. These may be new releases, beloved classics, hidden gems. Let's all connect on a love of reading.
Have a look at some of the titles we are absolutely loving right now! | Some Scary Picks to End October... Well...ok, no, not so scary this time around (though personally I've always been intimidated by Cormac McCarthy). Speaking of McCarthy, he has a new book! Celebrated author of Blood Meridian, The Road, and many, many more, has his brand new title, The Passenger out this week! And stay tuned because he's not done, he has another coming in December. Toad brings us a previously unpublished novel by the late author Katherine Dunn, writer of the cult classic Geek Love. While I'm wary of anything having to do with the holidays before Halloween is past, I couldn't wait to include my personal pick for holiday rom-com of the year, Kiss Her Once for Me, which is the sophomore release by Alison Cochrun, writer of 2021's The Charm Offensive. Actor Sam Heughan is very proud of his Scottish heritage. As Jamie Fraser on the TV version of Outlander, he's become a fan favourite of man, but the thing is, he's also a decent author, having previously written Clanlands & the accompanying Clanlands Almanac with his costar, Graham McTavish, and now with his own personal biography of how his homeland has shaped him, Waypoints. | For details on all of this week's new titles, click here! | | Gruesome and Grim: Five Spine-Chilling Fairy Tales for Spooky Season |  Illustration by Otto Ubbelohde to the fairy tale The Robber Bridegroom, 1909 | | One time of year never fails to bring out our biggest fears...tax season... I'm kidding, you know I mean Halloween. What's more, we as a society seem to love being scared, under controlled circumstances of course. There's psychological studies examining it...we love horror. Not everyone, and not always, but it's a testament to the genre that no matter how much society may change over the centuries, we love to consume horror related media as much now as we did back in Mary Shelley's day. With that in mind, lets get us some of that dopamine with these scary fairy tales, courtesy of Rachel Ayers on Tor.com... ~Alex Fairy tales are often considered children’s tales (though I feel like my fellow Tor.com readers are generally well aware that they were not always intended this way). There are many tales of trial and tribulation, overcoming the odds, and happily ever afters. After all, as G.K. Chesterson put it: “Fairy tales do not tell children the dragons exist. Children already know that dragons exist. Fairy tales tell children the dragons can be killed.” But more than that, the best stories allow us to grapple with our fears and with death itself, and teach us that the most difficult things can be overcome, and that healing is possible even after the darkest of times. That’s why so many of us revel in the Halloween season, embracing the darkness and remembering that it is also part of life. Staring out the window at a gloomy, rainy day doesn’t have to be a somber experience; you can join Morticia Addams in gazing upon the bleakest weather with joy if you know that rain is as necessary as sunshine. Some tales are particularly grim (or Grimm, of course!), and some of the darkest are considerably more obscure than the well-known romantic tales highlighted by large media corporations over the years. (Somehow I can’t imagine Disney animating “Bluebeard“—but if they did, I’d watch it…) To celebrate the spooky season, I want to highlight some particularly gruesome fairy tales, and I’ve paired them with modern retellings that cast them in the light of our modern sensibilities. We grapple with our mortality continually, and the best, darkest stories (modern or folkloric) give us a window through which to peer into the abyss, to confront our own mortality as well as that of those we love. The best horror tales address our darkest fears and remind us that what matters is fleeting, so we must do our best to treasure our relationships while they last and do justice to the difficulty of our worldly trials. So pour yourself the pumpkin-y drink of your choice, curl up with your fuzziest blanket, light a few candles and prepare yourself for some folkloric horror… “Fearnot, or Story of the Youth Who Went Forth to Learn What Fear Was”
We all have that one friend who claims that no scary movie or situation can frighten them. Or maybe we are that person. Fearnot is the story for anyone who is always looking for the next scariest movie, the one that will actually send them shivering to hide under the blankets. A more obscure Grimm tale, this is the story of a foolish boy who doesn’t feel fear. Perhaps he might have been heroic, but he is also lazy, and his parents despair of their son ever making anything of himself. After his fearlessness gets him into trouble (and results in a broken leg for the local sexton who tries to scare him by appearing as a ghost), the boy sets out into the world to try to discover what makes people shiver in terror. Eventually he comes to a city with a haunted castle. The king has promised his daughter and half his kingdom to anyone who can clear the castle of its ghosts by spending three nights there. (Arthurian scholars might recognize that a similar task was undertaken by Lancelot.) The boy fearlessly agrees to the task—plus he thinks the princess is fabulous. He spends the three nights in the castle, beset each night by demons in the forms of cats and dogs, a possessed bed, skeletons, and partial corpses that he seems to recognize as people he knew before he left home. The boy plays cards and bowls with some of them, and others he merely ignores, all the while remaining unflinchingly bold. When he beats a devil in the shape of an old man, the devil cries mercy and shows him the castle’s treasures, and the lad returns to the king for his reward and marries the princess. Still, he still feels perplexed over his lack of fear, and the fact that he’s never experienced even a momentary shudder of terror. His new wife, probably rolling her eyes at this, douses him with freezing water one night as he sleeps, and he wakes trembling with cold and grateful that she’s finally taught him the knack of shuddering. (In some versions, however, the realization that he could lose his beloved princess is what finally sets him to shivering; for while we might face our own mortality with relative aplomb, the idea of losing of a loved one can be the most frightening thing imaginable.) “Fraulein Fearnot” by Markus Heitz (from Fearie Tales: Stories of the Grimm and Gruesome, edited by Stephen Jones) Asa is a young woman with a job she loves…working at a haunted house (or rather, a natural cave that’s been converted into a haunted attraction). She finds it absolutely satisfying because she is never afraid of anything. When a couple of her fellow employees set out to scare her, things go terribly wrong, and she hits the road rather than stick around and get entangled in the aftermath following the unintended death of one of her coworkers. Her path leads her to ever more horrifying circumstances, crossing into different slices of urban legend folklore along the way, but Asa remains so chill through it all that she attracts the attention of a supernatural being who wants to put her fearlessness to a real test. Whether she’ll actually be frightened, though, as the horror elements move from special effects to the truly supernatural, remains to be seen. “The Singing Bone”
Alternative titles such as “The Bone Harp” or “The Bone Flute” abound, but at the center of every version of this story is a musical instrument made from human bone(s). This is the tale of two sisters (or sometimes brothers), one of whom is endlessly jealous of the other and tricks her sister into falling to her death in the swift-flowing river (or pushes her, depending on who you ask). When a traveling musician finds the bones, he crafts them into an instrument and gains widespread recognition for the eerily beautiful melodies the flute (or harp) produces. Eventually this renown leads him to be invited to play at the wedding of a local lord’s daughter, the surviving sister, who has gone to lead her life out of the shadow of her dead sister. She’s taken her sister’s place as the favorite, is marrying the young lord that her sister was promised to, and has enjoyed a life of riches and ease. Once in her presence, though, the bone instrument begins playing, all on its own, a song accusing the bride-to-be of murder and driving her to madness; she takes her own life rather than listen to her sister’s endless melody. “The Harp that Sang” by Gregory Frost (from Swan Sister: Fairy Tales Retold, edited by Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling) A fairly straightforward but lovely retelling; in his endnotes, Frost explains that he was inspired first by the ballad “The Cruel Sister” as performed by the British folk rock band Pentangle , which of course shares the same folkloric roots. Karla betrays her sister Beatrice, but allays her father’s suspicions by making a show of mourning her sister. When harpist Antonio finds Beatrice’s bones, tangled with her hair, he creates a harp from the bones and ties the golden hair around each string to make them glitter in the sunlight. Soon word of the hauntingly (ahem) beautiful harp music catches the attention of the local lord, who invites the harpist to play for his daughter’s wedding, and as soon as Karla starts her walk down the aisle, the harp begins playing on its own, and Karla’s sister (and fate) finds her. Click here for five more chilling fairy tales.... Also from Tor.com... Five Chilling Horror Novellas to Read This Fall by James Davis Nicoll Five Fun But Semi-Forgotten ’80s Horror Movies by Lorna Wallace |  Photo: Marko Blažević [via Unsplash] | | | How Horror and Politics Often Find Themselves Hand-In-Hand... | Not only do we use horror for a dopamine release, quite often horror is used as social commentary. There is a long running theme in the LGBTQ+ community all about how we often find ourselves identifying with the villains & monster in horror films over the so-called 'heroes'. With the way the community often is villainized in the media, it's hard not to see why. In a recent Atlantic article, 'The Unexpected Power of Seeing Yourself as a Villain', Mary Retta writes: "Despite such one-dimensional portrayals, queer and trans people have long found camaraderie in horror. Take Mary Shelley’s 1818 novel, Frankenstein, which has inspired countless explicitly queer retellings, including Jeanette Winterson’s 2019 Frankissstein and the 1975 camp classic The Rocky Horror Picture Show. "If monsters typically function as a mirror for society’s deepest anxieties, writers such as Susan Stryker go a step further. By intentionally mapping themselves onto well-known monster roles, they force a closer reading of what these works actually demonize—whether that’s free gender expression, pleasurable sex beyond the nuclear family, or other ways of living outside of societal norms. The new anthology It Came From the Closet: Queer Reflections on Horror mines this vein; its contributors suggest, in various ways, that the monster’s perspective isn’t just legitimate, but maybe even morally superior. "Queer writers often mark the tendency of horror-movie villains to wear masks, by force or by choice, as a way of concealing who they are from a terrified and unaccepting public. The writer Sachiko Ragosta speaks to this enduring image in the essay “On Beauty and Necrosis,” about the 1960 horror film Eyes Without a Face, which centers on a young woman whose father attempts to cover up her scarred face with a beautiful synthetic mask. In the character’s plight, Ragosta recognized their own childhood cover-ups—for instance, wearing dresses and bras in grade school to look more like a “girl”—and their struggle to accept that they were nonbinary. “Coming into my queerness,” Ragosta writes, “was an agreement to no longer borrow someone else’s skin to hide myself.” | Many marginalized groups have long been able to see themselves in horror, but it's only ramped up, and shifted, in the last few years. In his article from LitHub.com entitled At the Lonely Crossroads of Horror and the American Century, author W. Scott Poole talks about the Intertwined History of Horror Films and Social Critique: "Of course, horror and politics may seem as unrelated as raincoats and ice cream. The night you watch a horror movie is not the night you settle in with a history book or catch up on current events. You order pizza with friends and huddle together for the whirligig ride that jitters and jolts you. Ruined faces appear at rainy windows; the tension builds as a door creaks slowly into a vacuum of silence that suddenly erupts with screams. The whole flick comes in at just under ninety minutes and features a paranormal force unleashed by inebriated Gen Zs playing with that wicked old Ouija board or some comparable occult gadget. Or maybe a knife-wielding automaton will victimize the same age group for being at the worst possible place at the worst possible time. It’s escapist fun. You startle reflexively at the jump scares, something terrible suddenly filling the frame. Then you laugh at yourself and your friends, happy with your own terror. Someone makes jokes about being scared to go to bed that no one takes seriously. "After all, no one takes horror seriously. "Well, that’s no longer quite true. Over the last decade, as Americans became more acquainted with the twisted nature of their alleged exceptionalism, a clutch of horror films have given audiences more to think about than the dumb fun of a scare flick. Ari Aster’s Hereditary and Midsommar martialed complicated anxieties related to family, relationships, and social class. Aster jokingly called Hereditary 'just a little family drama' when in fact it’s a crucible that burns the very concept of middle-class American family life to cinders, leaving behind a taste of its ashes. "Similarly, Aster called Midsommar a 'breakup movie,' but if you know the grotesque denouement, that’s like referring to Scorsese’s 1976 Taxi Driver as a classic boy-meets-girl drama. Aster knows his films cut to the bone and leave us questioning everything we think we know about even the most intimate expectations we have for the American good life… romance, success, money, home, and family. Aster tells a story of American dreams grounded in trauma that then becomes inestimably worse, descending into insane violence. "Jordan Peele’s Get Out addressed racism in a “post-racial” society that maintains vast economic inequality and allows murderous police action against Black men and women. Peele’s film can be funny, horrific, and obsessively watchable. But in the meantime, it’s a devastating measure of white supremacy, a bleak miracle of a movie that addresses everything from the heritage of slavery to racist policing to the way social class informs a variety of racism just as brutal as you’d find in a lynch mob. "Zadie Smith called the film a “compendium of black fears about white folk,” both in terms of cultural symbolism and historical legacy. In Peele’s ability to bring his gift of “comic reversals” to horror, Get Out becomes a film that “contains its own commentary” by making audiences understand that African Americans look fearfully on everything from 'white women who date black men' to 'well-meaning conversations about Obama' to 'nostalgia for slavery' and, of course, 'slavery itself.' "In the wake of these films, a horrorsaince of social relevance, a debate between fandom and a relatively small number of cultural critics exploded across several social media platforms and resulted in a welter of dueling essays. Steve Rose set the cat among the pigeons first in his much-derided Guardian think piece “How Post-Horror Movies Are Taking Over Cinema.” In it, he described the traditional horror film using former secretary of defense Donald Rumsfeld’s infamously obtuse phrase known unknowns. Rose meant that while horror films proffered suspense, in reality every fan knows the accepted “rules” of the genre. He argued that, in general, horror movies are actually “one of the safest spaces in cinema” since a fan’s knowledge of what to expect provides them with a “flashlight” for the darkest corners a director might lead them to." Both articles are fantastically written and I highly recommend reading them both in depth (they're quite long so I won't post their full texts here). It's great to think about those underlying themes. And it's also alright to just enjoy them on a surface level as well. Because, remember...horror is escapist fun... If you're curious for more, W. Scott Poole has a full book looking at this stuff, Dark Carnivals, which is available here | Dave's Corner... Some thoughts on recent (and not so recent) books by our own Mr. Worsley, in that distinctive voice of his... | After about four months, a favourite book has finally come back to Words Worth.
Waterloo, Wellington & Guelph Hikes by Nicola Ross is due to reprint and ship by early November. For those who missed it the first time around, we've sold more copies of that book (Hamilton, Caledon, Collingwood, Dufferin and Halton regions round out the Loops & Lattes series) than anything else in the last fifteen years, likely in the entire thirty plus years of the store. Nicola Ross knows every trail, every landmark, possibly every tree, rock and nest in Southern Ontario. Her wealth of local knowledge is unparalleled. | Tanis Macdonald is a professor at Wilfrid Laurier, a poet, essayist and, like Nicola, an incurable walker.
Her new book Straggle: Adventures in Walking While Female celebrates freedom of movement in and around both city and nature, but more notably illuminates the constraints involved in a little walk. “There are fewer books about walking written by someone like me. A woman with a demanding trauma brain, more than a decade of chronic pain, an intense need for solitude and whose adventures are small.” The limits of the body and the myriad of constraints on women in a public space are explored in and around an examined life and within the life of the pandemic. “Every walk I take is in defiance of my parents’ warning to be careful because anything could happen,” she writes. Macdonald mines her familial history, poses engaging and troubling questions of agency, well being and the march of time, and examines the politics of something both universal and specific in a simple walk. Straggle's essays are vibrant, full of wisdom and humour, and are a necessary update to the Thoreau collections on our shelves. | One of my favourite novelists has a new one out, but unfortunately for now William Boyd's The Romantics is only in the UK. It drops in North America next summer.
In a recent Guardian piece he notes: "The 1980’s was a kind of boom period but the challenge for a literary novelist now is to just keep the show on the road. It used to be that you could write a novel every couple of years or so and have a perfectly nice bourgeois life. Now the mid-list has gone. The brutal fact is you either sell or you don’t. Friends of mine who’ve written 12 novels can’t get published or their advances have dropped by 80%. It’s a much tougher world." It's a tougher world for most. Consequently I remember the 1980’s rather fondly, although thankfully I've since gotten my hair figured out. When reading the William Boyd article I was in the middle of the new Jonathan Coe novel, Mr. Wilder & Me. He, like William Boyd, is someone I'll read anytime there's new stuff on offer. Both of these fellows are rather similar to Ian McEwan insofar as they're forward looking Brits who can seemingly write in any guise, style or even genre they like. I felt Jonathan Coe's last couple efforts didn't work that well, so approached the new one with some trepidation. Mr. Wilder & Me marks an absolute return to form. Following the last few decades of the life of filmmaker Billy (Some Like it Hot, Sunset Boulevard) Wilder, . On the back of his career, he's trying to get financing for new work. Meanwhile, Calista writes film scores and has achieved some success, but is struggling with empty nest syndrome and a nagging sense that her best work, certainly her best times, are behind her. A chance meeting propels them both to Greece and Coe's signature greatness at making pages turn ever quicker as the story parks in several parts of the globe while tackling the big questions of life, love, worth and time with a big helping of literary flair and near perfect weight and balance. Second chances are rare and he's made the most of his. There are, as William Boyd noted, many who aren't so lucky. | The other side of this coin presents itself in the form of Jennette McCurdy.
On the strength of her massive memoir, I'm Glad My Mom Died, she's just signed a deal with Ballantine Books for "several million" dollars. From the industry journal Publishers Weekly: ‘The Simon & Schuster title, which details the author’s relationship with her abusive stage mother and her struggles with addiction. "This new deal, her agent Peter McGuigan added, marks a step McCurdy has long wanted to take. “Jennette wants to write fiction,” McGuigan said. “Being a novelist is her dream job.”’ Full marks to McCurdy for coming through her trials and for being in the right place at the right time. It's nonetheless, a minor irritant that my parents never gave me (much) cause to write a salacious memoir. Perhaps something cataclysmic will happen over the Holidays. | Wild Writers Festival, This Weekend! The Wild Writers Literary Festival is returning in-person starting tonight! This year's program features familiar faces including Helen Humphreys, Farzana Doctor, and Carrie Snyder while introducing new faces to our festival like Heather O'Neill, Alexander MacLeod, Aimee Wall and more. We hope to see you! Your own trusty newsletter writer will be manning the table at tonight's Opening Showcase held at Knox Presbyterian Church from 7pm to 9pm! Hope to see you all there! | Book Launch: Emily Urquhart's Ordinary Wonder Tales Join us for the launch of Emily Urquhart's beautiful new essay collection, ORDINARY WONDER TALES. The event will feature a reading, Q&A, and book signing. The event will be hosted by Tanis MacDonald, author of STRAGGLE: ADVENTURES IN WALKING WHILE FEMALE. Books will be available from Words Worth books. The event is happening Tues, November 1st at 7:00 pm at the KPL. Click here for event details! | Stay tuned for more event listings next issue! | | Don't Forget Our Bookclubs! | The Next Books Words Worth Book Club: November 29: What’s Mine and Yours by Naima Coster
Blomkvist Wannabes: November 10: City on Fire by Don Winslow
Spec-Fics & Chill: November 30: Son of a Trickster by Eden Robinson Note: As of September, the Words Worth Book Club will be returning to in-person meetings, starting on Tuesday, September 27. As the store is still closing at 6pm, the meeting will be held at the Harper branch of the WPL, 500 Fischer-Hallman Rd N.
The SpecFics & Chill group is remaining remote. And the Mystery Boys...well, they do their own thing. | Book Humour Maybe there's a vegan alternative? | (Today's Comic is by Scott Hillborn) | Mwahahaha....and now that you've foolishly read the whole newsletter, it's given the killer time to come up right behind you! Did I make you look over your shoulder? Then mission accomplished. Until next issue, I hope you all have a wonderful couple weeks. Remember to be kind to one another, go easy on the candy (especially the day-after-Halloween clearances), and have a wonderful and safe Halloween! | Spooky regards,
Alex, and the whole Words Worth team | | |
