{"id":1218,"date":"2016-10-26T15:43:23","date_gmt":"2016-10-26T14:43:23","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.canterbury.ac.uk\/expertcomment\/?p=1218"},"modified":"2016-10-26T16:44:00","modified_gmt":"2016-10-26T15:44:00","slug":"top-five-reads-that-will-haunt-you-this-halloween","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.canterbury.ac.uk\/expertcomment\/top-five-reads-that-will-haunt-you-this-halloween\/","title":{"rendered":"Top five reads that will haunt you this Halloween"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><strong><em>Looking to avoid the Trick-or-Treaters this Hallowe\u2019en so you can curl-up and read a book? Canterbury Christ Church University\u2019s English Literature academics share their Top Five books to give you a fright this Halloween:<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n<p><!--more--><\/p>\n<ul>\n<li><strong><em>Rawblood<\/em><\/strong> (2015) by Catriona Ward<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p><em>Set in a lonely Dartmoor manor house\u00a0called Rawblood, this tale of gothic horror\u00a0follows the\u00a0household\u00a0from the\u00a0Victorian era up through World War I, and\u00a0back again, as its inhabitants\u00a0struggle against a curse that keeps them isolated and dooms\u00a0them to die young. It opens in the sensuous yet oddly serrated voice of eleven-year-old Iris Villarca, who is forced to confront a dark family secret.\u00a0Tense,\u00a0chilling, and heart-breaking,\u00a0Rawblood is a &#8216;Neo-Victorian&#8217;\u00a0ghost story that brings together the uncanny atmosphere of a nineteenth-century classic like\u00a0The Turn of the Screw,\u00a0with the innovative structure\u00a0of a\u00a0contemporary work\u00a0like\u00a0Cloud Atlas.\u00a0A perfect Halloween read<\/em>\u00a0\u2013 Dr Susan Civale<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li><strong><em>The Yellow Wall-Paper<\/em><\/strong> (1890) by Charlotte Perkins Gilman<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p><em>The Yellow Wall-Paper makes for as disturbing a read as Edgar Allan Poe\u2019s tales of horror. Like her better-known predecessor, Gilman exploits to great effect such gothic staples as the haunted house, the dread of confinement, the descent into madness. Much more than a quick, blood-curdling fix, this short story is an indictment of the destructive pressure to conform to a spurious notion of \u2018true womanhood\u2019. Sadly, this chimes with recent reports of the increase in mental health illness affecting young women who continue to be measured up against unrealistic standards of (social media-friendly) feminine perfection. Gilman\u2019s story is scarily topical, and not just because of Halloween<\/em> \u2013 Dr Stefania Ciocia<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li><strong><em>The Monastery<\/em><\/strong> (1820) by Walter Scott<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p><em>The Monastery turns All-Hallows\u2019 Eve from a date on the calendar into a crucial plot point. What Scott offers is a Border romance three times over. It uses Melrose as a setting. It situates itself in the middle of the sixteenth century, at the historical divide between the old religion and the new. And its inclusion of a ghostly White Lady creates that same leaning \u2018rather to the immaterial than the substantial world\u2019 by which <\/em><em>Halloween is marked. Ponderous in places, the novel borders on being one of those large, loose, baggy monsters which scare readers at this, or any other time of the year. But it is also a masterly mapping of what Hawthorne would later term that \u201cneutral territory, somewhere between the real world and fairy-land, where the Actual and the Imaginary may meet, and each imbue itself with the nature of the other <\/em>\u2013 Dr Peter Merchant<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li><strong><em>Twilight Stories<\/em><\/strong> (1873) by Rhoda Broughton<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p><em>Broughton\u2019s Twilight Stories have a sardonic wit and apparently limitless pessimism which helps us to remember just how little we really know about the dark side of the nineteenth century<\/em> &#8211; Professor Carolyn Oulton<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li><strong><em>The Saga of Erik the Red<\/em><\/strong> (Eir\u00edks saga rau\u00f0a) by unknown<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p><em>The walking dead, a seeress with cat-skin gloves, and encounters between Native Americans and Norse settlers in the Viking Age make this short Icelandic saga perfect reading material for Halloween. Discover the risks involved in praying to Thor for whale meat, and why you should bury your dead with a stake firmly hammered into their grave, in this early account of Europeans in Greenland and North America<\/em> \u2013 Dr Michael Bintley<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Looking to avoid the Trick-or-Treaters this Hallowe\u2019en so you can curl-up and read a book? Canterbury Christ Church University\u2019s English Literature academics share their Top Five books to give you [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":246,"featured_media":1221,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[393],"tags":[1058],"class_list":["post-1218","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-culture","tag-literature"],"acf":[],"aioseo_notices":[],"authorName":"holly finch","featuredImage":"https:\/\/blogs.canterbury.ac.uk\/expertcomment\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/437\/2016\/10\/Halloween-reads.jpg","postExcerpt":"Looking to avoid the Trick-or-Treaters this Hallowe\u2019en so you can curl-up and read a book? Canterbury Christ Church University\u2019s English Literature academics share their Top Five books to give you [&hellip;]","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.canterbury.ac.uk\/expertcomment\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1218","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.canterbury.ac.uk\/expertcomment\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.canterbury.ac.uk\/expertcomment\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.canterbury.ac.uk\/expertcomment\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/246"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.canterbury.ac.uk\/expertcomment\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1218"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.canterbury.ac.uk\/expertcomment\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1218\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1226,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.canterbury.ac.uk\/expertcomment\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1218\/revisions\/1226"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.canterbury.ac.uk\/expertcomment\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1221"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.canterbury.ac.uk\/expertcomment\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1218"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.canterbury.ac.uk\/expertcomment\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1218"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.canterbury.ac.uk\/expertcomment\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1218"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}