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CJ brought up a good point in a related and most awesomely-awesome thread, chiefly that the winter months are just as good for creepy ghostly readings as the autumnal months. As I mention over in yon thread, technically, autumn doesn't close until 21 December...
I think the illimitable CJ is right--Thanksgiving and Christmas aside, I'm from Alaska where November and December are synonymous, in my mind, with absolute and utter quiet; desolation and drear; solitude and a queer, silent, tangible agoraphobia, where the entire world echos soundlessly back at you. New meaning to all that the-woods-were-lovely-dark-and-deep jazz...
Still, I think of September-October as haintish, and November-December as murderful.
To this end...
Best Books for a Murderous, Desolate Winter.
What are some of your favorite, deathly-cold titles?
THE SILENT LAND by Graham Joyce is a pretty terrifying ice-cold read (about two people stuck in a ski resort cut off by an avalanche).
THE TERROR by Dan Simmons, about the fate of the Franklin Expedition to find the North-West Passage. Very, very cold.
JV Jones's SWORD OF SHADOWS series is an epic fantasy set in a northern polar region.
George R.R. Martin's DYING OF THE LIGHT is set on a planet slowly freezing as it escapes the gravitational pull of its star and wanders into interstellar space.
Peter Straubs 'Ghost Story' is a snowy, murder-y mess!
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The graphic novels of 30 Days of Night.
That Steven King novel about the long walk.
THE TERROR by Dan Simmons, about the fate of the Franklin Expedition to find the North-West Passage. Very, very cold.
Read this book two winters ago and just thinking about it makes me cold!
I think at one point it's winter in Joe Abercrombie's BEST SERVED COLD, but it's certainly murderous!
And I thoroughly enjoyed Daniel Abraham's A Betrayal in Winter, although it might be a bit incomprehensible unless you read its predecessor A Shadow in Summer.
The Shining by Stephen King. I've read it a dozen times now and it still freaks me out.
"Rider At The Gate" by CJ Cherryh is a really COLD book!
"Night without End" by Alistair MacLean - A Cold war thriller:)
"Ulysses" by Alistair MacLean - A light cruiser on a murmansk convoy (based on convoy PQ-17)
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Shhhh...listen. The wind whistles softly through the topmost branches, only a spare leaf or two rattle and tremble. The trees are nearly bare---skeletal and frail in the perpetual rainy gloom, the cold autumnal twilight; their motions against the pregnant white dollop of a skull-faced moon make a sound in your heart like wheezing, rickety old women.
Shhh...listen. The scritch-scratch-scrape of the once-sheltering oaks, now towering reaping trolls, tick their grim dark fingers across the frosted glass, freezing time and shadows, stilling your breath to a hard lump of bitter coal deep in your throat.
Shhh...listen. They're coming. Don't move; don't breathe. They're coming. They're coming. They're coming...
It's the most muderful time of the year! Mysteries and Thrillers! Algernon Blackwood! Arthur Machen! William Hope Hodgson! What are your post-Halloween reads?
I'm reading The House on the Borderland.
The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K LeGuin
Icelandic sagas
Kushiel's Dart, and Kushiel's Justice by Jacqueline Carey
Ian Rankin's Rebus novels.
The Privilege of the Sword by Ellen Kushner - actually, the "illuminated" audio version might be even more winter-appropriate.
Collections of fairy tales.
Snorre's Edda
Lovecraft is always worth a re-read. For winter months, At the Mountains of Madness is suffused with bone-chilling cold, as it's set in Antarctica.
Stephen King's The Shining is another good one for the winter.
I was at my Friendly Local Bookstore last week, and on a whim, I picked up a copy of the horror short story anthology A Book of Horrors, edited by Stephen Jones. I'm only about halfway through it, and some of the stories are better than others, but some of them are pretty damn creepy!
And, for a good nonfiction read that touches on real-life existential horror, try Eric Schlosser's latest book, Command and Control: Nuclear Weapons, The Damascus Incident, and the Illusion of Safety. It really drives home how close (and how often) the world really came to global annihilation during (and after!) the Cold War. (Did you know that the Air Force accidentally dropped a live four-megaton nuclear bomb on rural Goldsboro, North Carolina in 1961?) It was fully armed, and the only thing that prevented it from detonating was a faulty switch-- meaning that it would have misfired if deliberately deployed.
THAT scared me far more than any creepy ghost story!
Five Go Adventuring Again
I don't read seasonally, but the following seems on-theme for the thread:
The Arctic Grail by Pierre Berton. Nonfiction. Enjoy.
(It's a contributing factor to my profound distaste for Simmons' The Terror,of course...)
"Misery" by Stephen King.
The Worst Journey in the World - a firsthand account of Captain Scott's Antarctic expedition.
The Dark is Rising - technically the second book in the series of the same name, set around Christmas, and the mythology of winter.
The Worst Journey in the World - a firsthand account of Captain Scott's Antarctic expedition.
Good ol' Cherry-Garrard. Always good for a laugh!
A laugh of profound gratitude that you aren't going through what he went through...
The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo has a long section where the main character who is not the girl with the dragon tattoo spends a lot of time alone in the dead of the Swedish winter with darkness and open faced sandwiches and peculiarly precise prose ("I watched 28 minutes and 32 seconds of a sitcom and ate 552 pieces of popcorn.").