I have usually devoted at least one October post to “haunting books,” because October is both National Book Month and the month we celebrate Halloween. This year, I have a long list of books I’ve read in the last twelve months that could be considered haunting. I’ve winnowed the group down to a dozen books, which I’m grouping into three categories.
First, here are the top five thrillers I read this past year. These were written with the intention of scaring readers, so they definitely qualify as haunting books. These are listed alphabetically by author’s name.
The Last Flight, by Julie Clark — Two women, Claire and Eva, both at dreadful turning points in their lives, switch boarding passes and take each other’s flights. Then one of the planes goes down, with no survivors. Claire survives and takes Eva’s identity, only to find murder and mayhem in Eva’s past. Readers discover the backstories of both women, all the time wondering, did Eva board the flight that went down? A haunting question, which I will not answer.
Playing Nice, by J.P. Delaney — We’ve seen this story in the news—a tale of babies switched at birth. In this story, the two families start by trying to work out the complications arising from the mix up. But one baby is a bundle of energy, while the other has serious birth defects. And the families come from unequal financial backgrounds. Then, after a while, one of the couples doesn’t play nice . . . Haunting questions about parenting. And evil.
The Searcher, by Tana French — In this thriller, Tana French takes a break from her Dublin Murder Squad series and writes about an American cop who retires to Ireland. The protagonist, Cal Hooper, deals with a broken marriage, a finished career, and a dilapidated house. When a local teen asks for help finding his missing older brother, Cal takes on another case to solve. The book is paced differently than French’s earlier books, but the writing is equally good, by turns lovely and haunting.
The Survivors, by Jane Harper — I haven’t read many books set in Australia, but I love Jane Harper’s thrillers. The Survivors is set on the coast of Tasmania, rather than in the dry outback. The protagonist, Kieran Elliott, has brought his young family home for the first time in many years to visit his aging parents. The whole family is haunted by the death of Kieran’s older brother in a freak accident. . . . Or was it an accident? Tangled past relationships, an old missing person case, and a new death increase the tension.
We Begin at the End, by Chris Whitaker — Walk, a middle-aged sheriff with Parkinson’s Disease, must discover who murdered Star, his childhood friend, in time to save her two children. The older child, Duchess Day Ridley, is one of the best written teenage girl characters since Mattie Ross in True Grit. The grudging friendship between Walk and Duchess makes this book, which is beautiful at times and ugly at others. Wondering what happened to these characters still haunts me.
And next, the five historical novels I read this year that have stuck with me longer than typical books of this genre, also listed alphabetically by author.
The Other Bennet Sister, by Janice Hadlow — Janice Hadlow gives readers yet another possible future for the Bennet sisters after Pride and Prejudice. This novel gives Mary, the prim middle sister, a life in which she escapes her plainness and finds independence of a sort. She is a sympathetic protagonist, and the reader hopes Mary did in fact become more than Jane Austen made her. It’s a haunting prospect for writers to see peripheral characters take on a life of their own.
The Four Winds, by Kristin Hannah — The Dust Bowl years in Texas certainly make for a heart-wrenching plot, but Elsa Martinelli’s situation moves from bad to worse when she takes her children west to California. Everything that can go wrong does. John Steinbeck did it better in The Grapes of Wrath, but Kristin Hannah has turned out another novel about women surviving through desolation. If anything, I thought the novel’s bleakness was overdone, but it was definitely haunting.
Outlawed, by Anna North — The novel centers on a group of renegade women known as the Hole in the Wall Gang in an alternative history of the 1890s. Flu decimated much of the population decades earlier, and there was no Civil War (the former slaves freed themselves). Following a messianic leader, the gang engages in many Western tropes, but also faces modern themes of misogynism, homosexuality, and racism. Seeing these themes in a dystopian Western made the book haunting, if a bit weird.
The Last Tea Bowl Thief, by Jonelle Patrick — This novel follows a master potter’s tea bowl that was created in feudal Japan and resurfaced during World War II and in modern times, with story lines in these three time periods. The characters from the past haunt me more than the modern characters, though I was sympathetic to the modern characters’ challenges as well. This novel stands up well against Lisa See’s The Tea Girl of Hummingbird Lane, a novel about the Chinese tea industry by a more famous author. Jonelle Patrick loves Japan, and it shows in her research and care in depicting the nation’s past and present.
The Lost Apothecary, by Sarah Penner — This dual timeline novel was set both in modern times and in early 19th-century London. I don’t know much about medicines (or poisons) used in the 19th century, and I enjoyed this peek into a shady corner of that era. The historical story line of the lost apothecary is dark and haunting, and was more interesting than the modern story.
And finally, a couple of books that deal with paths not taken, or paths that might be taken, a theme that is always haunting:
The Midnight Library, by Matt Haig — What if you had made other choices in life and taken a path that you now regret missing? Maybe it would have turned out, and maybe not. Those are the issues that Matt Haig explores in this fantasy novel. The first part of this book is very dark, as we count down the hours until Nora, the protagonist, tries to commit suicide. Then the pace picks up. Readers root for Nora to find a good life, while questioning what regrets they have in their own lives. The meme of the library was a little hokey, but I liked it better than Colson Whitehead’s actual railroad in The Underground Railroad.
The Book of Two Ways, by Jodi Picoult — I have a love/hate relationship with Jodi Picoult. Her books raise such good issues, but they also make me feel like I’m being manipulated. In this novel, after a near plane crash, Dawn Edelstein, the protagonist, is given a second chance to become the Egyptologist she hoped to be in her college years. Some readers think there’s too much history in the book, but I didn’t mind that. (After all, I’ve read several of Elizabeth Peters’s historical mysteries about Egyptologist Amelia Peabody.) Picoult’s book takes readers through Dawn’s two possible paths—the life she led after her mother’s death (a career as a “death doula,” a reasonably solid marriage, and motherhood), and the life in which she stayed in Egypt with the man she adored. In this book, Picoult didn’t tell readers which of the two ways was better, which left it haunting for me. Or was that yet another method for Picoult to manipulate her readers?
There you go—an even dozen “haunting books” to celebrate October. And as a bonus, I’ve included what I think are the most haunting covers.
What haunting books have you read this year?
