Guest Post – Top Five Halloween Reads by Chris Priestley
Halloween may be over for another year *cries* but fear not I have a spooky post Halloween treat for you today!
I am super excited to be part of the blog tour to celebrate the release of Curse Of The Werewolf Boy by Chris Priestley.
Curse Of The Werewolf boy was released on the 5th October published by Bloomsbury and is a fantastic MG read to really sink your teeth into!
Today Chris shares his top 5 Halloween reads in this fab guest post….
Mildew and Sponge don’t think much of Maudlin Towers, the blackened, gloomladen, gargoyle-infested monstrosity that is their school. But when somebody steals the School Spoon and the teachers threaten to cancel the Christmas holidays until the culprit is found, our heroes must spring into action and solve the crime!
But what starts out as a classic bit of detectivating quickly becomes weirder than they could have imagined. Who is the ghost in the attic? What’s their history teacher doing with a time machine? And why do a crazy bunch of Vikings seem to think Mildew is a werewolf?
Hugely funny, deliciously creepy and action-packed by turns, this brand new series from Chris Priestley is perfect for 8+ readers who like their mysteries with a bit of bite. Fans of Lemony Snicket and Chris Riddell will love Curse of the Werewolf Boy.
Top Ten Halloween Reads
I could list dozens of books that would make good reading for Halloween. I spent much of my teens and twenties reading uncanny and unsettling stories of one kind or another – which is why I ended up writing the Tales of Terror series and many other works designed to disturb.
I realise Halloween has now become bound up with a more violent side of horror, but I’m here to champion old school chills. These are some of the stories and writers that inspired me to write chillers myself.
The Ash Tree – MR James
I could have chosen any M R James story, I suppose, but The Ash Tree came to mind for various reasons. It has a witch in it, for one thing – and that seems appropriate for Halloween – but it is also very creepy. If you don’t like spiders you may want to give it a miss, but then again, you will undoubtedly find it troubling (and after all, it is meant to unsettle). If you have a tree with branches tapping against your windows, you may want to get the tree surgeon in before you read this.
The Woman in Black – Susan Hill
Not the Woman in Black again, I hear you yell. It’s always in people’s top creepy reads. Yes it is. But there’s a very good reason for that. It’s really hard to write a creepy novel – a properly creepy novel. Susan Hill is our greatest living exponent of it. The Woman in Black is pitch perfect. It pulls us into the story by gently making us care about Arthur Kripps as he journey’s to the bleak Jamesian east coast town of Crythin Gifford.
The location is fantastic and in the Woman in Black we have one of the iconic ghosts of horror fiction. If you think you know it because you’ve seen the film, think again. The book is far, far superior. This is the kind of story that needs to be read to work its magic. Rent yourself a lonely cottage by the sea and scare yourself silly.
The Haunting of Hill House – Shirley Jackson
I saw the 1960s film adaptation – The Haunting – before I read the novel. The film is great but the book is something else. Following on from Edgar Allan Poe’s attempt to make the house itself a character in the Fall of the House of Usher, Shirley Jackson makes Hill House a ‘living’ and malevolent force in the story. It is a really strange and claustrophobic book, best read in as close to one sitting as possible, I think.
The Shining – Stephen King
I was very snooty about Stephen King when I was young, despite having friends who were fans. The first book I read of his was Misery and I was a little underwhelmed. But Carrie and The Shining are great. Once again, The Shining plays with that idea of the house itself being the monster. The Overlook Hotel in the Rockies is another great location – so important in a good ghost story. The narrative shifts mainly between Danny, the boy with telepathic abilities – ‘the shining’ – and his deeply flawed father, Jack, an aspiring writer who has taken a job as caretaker. He and his wife will be snowed in over winter and cut off from the outside world. A really affecting – and scary – story that has compelling characters at its heart.
Ringing the Changes – Robert Aickman
I discovered Robert Aickman relatively recently. Or rather I registered his name only relatively recently. I actually have a few of his stories in various collections. Faber have recently reissued all his stories in several handsome looking books. I am still working my way through them. They are too rich to consume in great chunks, so I read them one at a time and savour them. Most of the ones I have read are deeply strange and genuinely nightmarish – like having an access all areas pass to a very disturbed mind.
Ringing the Changes has quite a Jamesian set-up on the face of it. A couple arrive at an East Anglian coastal town and the bells of all the churches start ringing – and ringing and ringing and ringing. But it’s like James after a bad night. The characters are edgy and unpleasant and the story is, like so much of Aickman, genuinely unhinged.
You can buy a copy of Curse Of The Werewolf Boy here or from your local bookshop
Or why not add it to your Goodreads list here
About Chris Priestley
Ever since he was a teenager, Chris has loved unsettling and creepy stories. He has fond memories of buying comics like Strange Tales and House of Mystery, watching classic BBC TV adaptations of M.R. James’ ghost stories every Christmas and reading assorted weirdness by everyone from Edgar Allan Poe to Ray Bradbury. He hopes his books will haunt his readers in the way those writers have haunted him.
You can find out more about Chris on his website – www.chrispriestleybooks.com
Or why not follow Chris on Twitter – @crispriestley
Blog Tour
Catch up or follow the rest of this fab blog tour at the following stops!
A huge thank you to Chris for such a fab post and to Faye Rogers for asking me to be part of this fab blog tour!
Have you read Curse Of The Werewolf Boy? Did you enjoy? What did you love about it? What are your favourite Halloween reads? I would love to hear from you! Why not leave a comment using the reply button at the top of the post or tweet me on twitter using @ChelleyToy !
Happy Reading!
