5 Books with an Ominous Tone
Many people enjoy reading more mysterious or spooky books around Halloween, and this book list is inspired by my reading Thomas Hardy for the first time earlier this year. The title—The Distracted Preacher and Other Tales—initially made me laugh; I definitely wasn’t expecting what I encountered. This collection of short stories and novellas surprised me, and I thought it would be a fantastic choice for October. Its ominous tone reminded me of a few other literary novels:
The Distracted Preacher and Other Tales by Thomas Hardy
At first, these stories seem to fit the mold of 18th-century English literature you might expect, but each of them take a turn where they suddenly feel more gothic in mood. Things that can go wrong do go wrong, and there’s an overall sinister feeling that makes them nothing like what I was expecting. They left me feeling unsettled but in a very genteel way.
All Hallows’ Eve* by Charles Williams
Charles Williams was a member of the Inklings with C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien. I’d never read his work, and this book had a seasonal title, so I chose it to read last October. Much like the Thomas Hardy novellas, I had no idea what I was getting into with this book. The story opens at the end of WWII and is an eerie and strange exploration of good and evil, death, magic, repentance and being born again. It wasn’t a fun read but extremely discussable.
Rebecca* by Daphne du Maurier
This well-known novel filled me with such a sense of dread. Du Maurier transports her readers into a dark and oppressive atmosphere in which they try to unravel what is going on at Manderley along with the main character (who is not Rebecca…or is she?) all while creating quite possibly one of the scariest villains in English literature. Mrs. Danvers gives me the heebie-jeebies.
The Cornell Woolrich Omnibus (I couldn’t find the collection I read, but here are several of his short stories.)
I don’t normally enjoy reading short stories back-to-back because of the work it takes to get oriented to the setting and characters in a short amount of time, but Woolrich’s short stories suck you in quickly. He creates horribly tense situations in just a few paragraphs. I picked this up because he wrote the story Rear Window that the Alfred Hitchcock movie is based on, and that is a childhood favorite of mine. Last year I recommended the novel I Married a Dead Man for an atmospheric October read. His stories fall squarely in the noir category.
The Case-Book of Sherlock Holmes* by Arthur Conan Doyle
This collection of twelve stories are not quite as oppressive and ominous as the others, but I really wanted a fifth literary book for this list, and with titles like The Adventure of the Sussex Vampire I think it has a place here. I really enjoyed reading it. I’ll close with a quote from this collection.
“The world is big enough for us. No ghosts need apply.”
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