Scary Books to Read This Season

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As Halloween fast approaches, you might be wondering about some scary books to get you into the holiday spirit.  Something that will chill your bones.  People have been talking a lot about the new “It” movie, and how it scares the wits out of people, but if you’ve already seen it, or would rather just stay home and read, here are some terrifying books:

Ghost Story (Peter Straub): A book titled “Ghost Story” could be pretty cheesy in the hands of the wrong writer, yet Straub is able to make it anything but.  It’s the story of a group of old men who gather to tell ghost stories, only to be set upon by the horrors of their past.  

The Exorcist (William Peter Blatty): While it’s since become a cliche of pop culture, “The Exorcist” movie caused a sensation when it first hit theaters.  A level of graphic and terrifying as yet unseen in film, it sent audience members over the edge.  And the book it’s based off of is even scarier and more graphic.  

House of Leaves (Mark Z. Danielewski): This book takes the horror cliché of a haunted house and delivers it in a truly unique way.  It uses unusual page layout and style, meant to disorient the reader.  The way that text is arranged on the page is meant to mirror events in the story and create a unique effect mirroring agoraphobia and claustrophobia.  

The Witches of Worm (Zilpha Keatley Snyder): While the story of a girl who buys a kitten and nurses it back to health has a lot of potential for a heart-warming tale, “The Witches of Worm” is anything but.  After the main character, a girl named Jessica, buys a kitten, she comes under its malevolent spell, and begins to act increasingly violent towards her family.  It’s a creepy enough story to get banned from school libraries.  

Diary (Chuck Palahniuk): Chuck Palahniuk is known, for good reason, for deeply disturbing books.  This one, about an aspiring artist who becomes embroiled in a generations-old conspiracy theory as her deeply disturbed husband falls into a coma and reveals his dark side, is written in a diary-style format that gives it a special degree of spookiness.  

Voices in the Night (Steven Millhauser): This collection of short stories take unique and terrifying looks at daily life.  Whether it’s a look at gossip in a small town or a man obsessed with his wife’s image in a mirror, these are stories guaranteed to spook you.

Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark (Alvin Schwartz): This trilogy of ghost stories might be meant for children, and indeed some of them can come across as a bit hokey, but what truly makes them are the illustrations by Stephen Gammell, which are able to make everything from a staircase to a mouse look creepy.  

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Checking Out Fifth Avenue This Season

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New York is a special place around the holiday season.  Gift shopping may be physically, emotionally and financially draining, especially if you’re going down Fifth Avenue.  Yet navigating these crowded streets offers a reward as well: exciting, ornate window displays and Christmas lights.  Here are some of the places you should see, taken from an article I read in Timeout:

Saks Fifth Avenue: The name of the game here is candy, and lots of it.  Tying in with the candy theme, Saks’ animated center features six windows along Fifth Avenue titled “The Nutcracker Sweet”, that takes the classic ballet and adds in candy.  Be sure not to miss a multicolored ten-story tall light show, which plays daily from 5 to 11pm every ten minutes for the rest of the month.  

Macy’s: While Macy’s is most famous for their Thanksgiving parades, that’s not to discredit their December decorations.  Their window display this year is titled “Believe”, and encourages spectators to once again believe in Santa.  Each of the six windows portray iconic holiday scenes.  

Barneys: The display at Barneys has nothing about snow or the North Pole.  Rather, the five windows offer various interpretations of their theme this year of “Love, Peace and Joy”.  Various artists, ranging from South Park co-creators to Nick Cave, contributed to the decorations.  If you take a picture of yourself making either a heart or peace sign or jumping for joy in front of these displays, then post it online with the #lovepeacejoyproject hashtag, then Barneys will donate $5 per photo to various charity causes.

Bloomingdale’s: This season, Bloomingdale’s teamed up with various artists to create chandeliers based around the word “light”.  There are eight windows in total, and the chandeliers will be auctioned off for charity at the end of the season.  So if you’ve got some money lying around (opening bids start at $2,000), you can take them home with you!

Lord & Taylor: Lord & Taylor’s “Enchanted Forest” displays various winter-themed vignettes, with 34 hand-sculpted animals and more than 350 square feet of LED walls.  

Tiffany & Co: Even though post-election protests have distracted from Tiffany’s display, they’re fighting back with a large display that promises to “Make the World Sparkle”, and they’re making good on it.  

Bergdorf Goodman: The “Destination Extraordinary” display from Bergdorf Goodman depicts various scenes of lush gardens, meant to be remakes of the dioramas in natural history museums.  There are five different displays, each one unique and extremely green.  

Henri Bendel: Henri Bendel’s four-story display, inspired by the Bleeding Hearts mural, is a lot less “traditional” than most 5th Avenue displays.  While you get a great view of it outside, it looks even better inside the store.   

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Karl Rove’s New Book

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A political cartoon from the 1896 election, showing McKinley and his advisor Mark Hanna

When it comes to presidential elections, they tend to be forgotten for the most part.  Chances are that most Americans don’t dwell on presidential elections, particularly any that happened before their lifetimes.  But Republican consultant Karl Rove isn’t like most Americans.  Because when he isn’t advising the super political action committee he helped to found or commenting on politics, he’s been researching one presidential election that’s fascinated him for a long time, which occurred nearly 120 years ago.  In November, he has a book coming out about the 1896 race between Democrat William Jennings Bryan and Republican William McKinley.  Today, publisher Simon & Schuster announced that the book is called “The Triumph of William McKinley: Why the Election of 1896 Still Matters”.

In a recent telephone interview, Rove said that he’d been working on the book for a couple of years, accumulating many bins of archival material.  He describes it as having violence, betrayal, ambition, integrity and “really cool nicknames”.  Rove seems to have an encyclopedic knowledge of the race, and can spout out detailed stories about the parties’ platforms, strategies and power brokers.  Since 2000, Rove has spoken about this election as a turning point that ended years of deadlock in Washington, leading to a generation of Republican prevalence, to which he had aspired while working with Bush.

In the book, Rove credits McKinley with running the first modern primary campaign, as well as the first modern campaign during a general election.  Rove has cited parallels to this election to the 2016 election, as debates on such issues as immigration and economic inequality emerged.

While William McKinley ultimately won the election, his Presidential career was cut short after he was assassinated in 1901.  He was going up against William Jennings Bryan, one of the great populist candidates in American history.  Bryan was a peace advocate, devout Christian and advocate of popular democracy.  He was a vocal opponent of the gold standard, opting instead for silver, which he felt would bring the country prosperity.  While initially not expected to earn the presidential nomination for the 1896 election, his legendary “Cross of Gold” changed all of that, and he went on to represent the Democratic Party in the race against McKinley.  While Bryan lost the election, he ended up running for President two more times.

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Stokely Carmichael Book Released

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Stokely Carmichael speaking at Berkeley, while a “Black Power” banner waves proudly and defiantly behind him.

Back in the 60s, Stokely Carmichael popularized the term “black power” and led the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), yet surprisingly, not too many people know about him.  Historian Peniel E. Joseph, whose book “Stokely: A Life” just came out, is on a mission to “recover” the name of Stokely Carmichael, who later changed his name to Kwame Ture.  Joseph, a professor of history at Tufts and the founding director of its Center for the Study of Race and Democracy, had access to interviews, exhaustive research and 20,000 previously unreleased pages of FBI files on the 1960s militant.

Stokely, a Trinidadian-American who grew up in the Bronx before he fled to Guinea, West Africa to try and promote a revolutionary Pan-African movement.  He died in 1998, at the age of 57, in Guinea.  Over the course of his political life, Stokely worked with civil rights activists like Dr. King, and also helped to start the Black Panther Party.  He became more and more radicalized as time passed, and finally declared that the highest political expression of black power was the Pan-African movement.

Henry Louis Gates Jr., director of the Hutchins Center for African and African American Research at Harvard, described Stokely as the “link” between the civil rights movement of Martin Luther King, Jr. and the radical black movement that emerged amongst the younger generations.  Many scholars and activists think that the book will invite debate about Stokely’s actions and legacy.  A good amount of that debate will probably focus on Stokely’s decision to leave the country in 1969, when the Black Panthers were in a violent struggle, Dr. King had just been assassinated and Stokely was being harassed by the FBI.

Many people will probably ask questions about Stokely’s increased radicalism and obsession with Pan-African ideology in the later part of his political life.  Scholars are still debating Stokely’s Pan-African ideology, and whether it betrayed a deep understanding or excessive idealism of his thinking.  Joseph, however, insists that his plan was to create an unbiased, even-handed picture of Stokely.  He portrays the revolutionary as a complex, charismatic figure.  He pushed his friend Dr. King to denounce the Vietnam War, worked with voting rights activist Fannie Lou Hamer and hung out with activist Tom Hayen.  He also had a tendency towards womanizing, which led to his divorce to South African singer Miriam Makeba.  But more than anything else, Stokely was an excellent organizer who participated in and helped put together every major civil rights demonstration and development in America during the early 60s.

Joseph has suggested that one of the reasons Stokely isn’t as well-known as his contemporaries Malcolm X and Dr. King might have to do with the fact that he wasn’t martyred.  But that should in no way trivialize the massive impact that Stokely had on the black power movement.  In the words of Joseph, Stokely pushed the envelope in racial discourse.  By talking about antiwar activism and anti-imperialism, he was looking at both racial and economic injustice.  Many of Stokely’s contemporaries are still alive, and have only good things to say about their now deceased comrade.

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The Rise of Indie Books

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James Franco has recently found success as an indie author.

I recently came across an article about “indie books”, a new phenomenon that has been causing stirs in the literary world.  Indies have been creating national and international bestsellers for authors who otherwise might have never had their works published at all.

Initially, indie books had a huge stigma; it was considered that the only reasons indie authors couldn’t get their works published was because they were just bad.  But today, indie authors are changing the industry.  Back in 2007, Amy Edelman created the website IndieReader, with the ambition of providing professional resources, up-to-date information and reviews for indie authors.  The advances of digital publishing and indie books have made the dream of many authors – to release good books without giving away control or profits – have since become reality.  The number of self-published books in 2012 rose 59 percent over 2011, growing to over 391,000 different titles.

As more and more traditional authors have left large publishing companies, new models are being created; hybrid publishers, for instance, have become increasingly popular.  There is no doubt that, thanks to digital advances, indie publishing will continue to evolve.  A successful indie author experiments with marketing strategies, pricing, promotion and connection.  The author of the article hypothesized that as the year moves forward, more indie authors will be signing with hybrid publishers.  Ultimately, readers want great books, whether they’re indie, involved with hybrid publishers or the heavy hitters.

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