Happy Friday, all!  And happy Halloween!

This week, I’ve been on a Simone St. James binge, starting with her second contemporary, The Sun Down Motel, which goes back and forth between the 1980s and the present day in the very haunted town of Fell, NY, before going back to her post World War I set classics: The Haunting of Maddy Clare, her very first book, which introduced her as a singular new talent in both historical fiction and ghost stories, and Silence for the Dead, her third book and my favorite (although it has some stiff competition!).  Very few people write actual ghost stories that are ghost stories these days, by which I mean 1) there is an actual ghost and not just a practical non-supernatural explanation; 2) no gore, no jump scares.  Simone does it brilliantly, whether she’s writing in the 1920s or the present and I recommend them all.

After that, there was a brief digression into witches, with Alix Harrow’s Once and Future Witches, set in an alternate turn of the century where witchcraft was once real, before being squished– and by squished, I mean rooted out with fire and gallows– and Marion Gibson’s Witchland: A Deadly Moral Panic in 17th Century Britain.  (As you can tell from the subtitle, the latter of these is non-fiction!).  Those of you who have been here a while will know that 17th century England was my academic field once upon a time, and particularly the 1640s.  Witchland is a remarkably user-friendly look at the complicated landscape of the 1640s through the prism of local witch trials, with Gibson walking the reader through the relevant information about the Civil Wars and the various character involved (love you, Rupert of the Rhine!  Not so much you, Earl of Essex).

What have you been reading this week?