Hi. It’s October, so that means it’s time for me to recommend some books I think you should read. Not that it’s something I typically do every month or even every October, but just ... y’know. Because. Actually both books are fall / October / Halloween themed, so I guess that’s something. Ah, don’t you just love it when I start writing stream-of-consciousness? Yeah. Me neither.

The first book is The Night Country and it is by a guy named Stewart O’Nan. Now, Stewart O’Nan is a prick, but I mean that in the nicest possible way. The way I see it, a writer can either write formulaic crap and publish a novel every year or so, or a writer can be important and literary but you only can squeeze out a whole new book every 3-5 years. That’s just the only fair tradeoff. Except here’s Stewart O’Nan, who writes and publishes a book pretty much every year ... and they’re all freaking good. That’s just not fair, people.

Everything I have read by O’Nan is good, but there are a few of his books that make me especially crazy. As I’ve said before, I can pay a writer no greater compliment than jealousy. Usually it’s abstract: I’m jealous of Toni Morrison’s talent and voice, but I have no desire to write like her. But O’Nan’s books are all very familiar. He writes with a plain voice that reminds me of my own writing and he often writes stories that I might write, if only the idea had come to me first. This is true of A Prayer for the Dying and Snow Angels, both of which are books that I love dearly and hate because I feel like I could have written them, but he just got there first.

Two years ago, O’Nan published The Night Country, yet another book that made me feel that way. It’s a ghost story but it uses ghosts more like Shakespeare did than the way Stepehn King does. (Did I mention Stephen King was one of O’Nan’s mentors? How is that fair?)

In the book, it’s Halloween and the one year anniversary of the night a group of teenagers went out driving and all but one ended up being killed in an accident that an overzealous young police officer may or may not have helped cause. The ghosts of the dead children are haunting the living – the friend who survived, the cop, their parents – but really they are not haunting so much as observing. It’s a bit like Alice Sebold’s Lovely Bones but more immediate. The ghosts are sometimes angry, sometimes sad, sometimes jealous. Some want the remaining friend to die. Some want the cop to die. At least one of them just doesn’t want to be a ghost anymore.

It’s a dark story, sometimes almost heartbreaking, but often countered by the ironic voice of the teenage narrator. Also, the mystery (not only of what will happen but of what happened the year before) drives the story and makes the short book a very fast read. I highly recommend it to you, even as I wish I could share it with you with my name on it instead.

And I don’t say that lightly. Snow Angels and A Prayer for the Dying felt like books I could write. But The Night Country was a book I was already writing in my head when I read it. I had somewhat recently read the aforementioned Sebold book as well as another book narrated by the dead called Hotel World by Ali Smith. I was in the mood to write a book narrated by the dead. I had the idea of a car crash, and I’m always tempted to set books around holidays, Halloween being the most appropriate for a ghost story. With all that, it was almost creepy for me to read The Night Country. It’s not a perfect book, though it is good. But even the things that aren’t great in it seem like things I might have screwed up if I wrote the story. So, I recommend it to you as a pleasant and not too long Halloween read: both because it’s worth your time and because reading it may actually reveal something about me, as well.

The other book I have to recommend is something very different from anything I would ever write. This is called House of Leaves and is by Mark Z. Danielewski, who is the brother of the singer Poe (remember "Hello" or "Angry Johnny"?) In fact, Poe's second album Haunted is sort of a companion piece to the book.

I recommend this one to you not because it is a great book (it’s been a while since I read it but I know there were parts of it I found tedious and some definite plot holes), but because it’s the only book I’ve ever read that has scared me.

I’ve read lots of horror, King, Koontz, Straub, Barker, etc, but the thing is that, really, books just can’t be scary. As a reader I can “fall into” a good story and be quite involved with it, but … it’s still just a book. Even as a kid, things in books just didn’t scare me. But this book, which I read when I was in college, scared the shit out of me.

Partly that’s because it plays to my fears. I’m just not scared of monsters, even in visual form something corporeal is something that can be dealt with. It’s not that scary (the girl from The Ring here being an obvious exception). What does scare me is the unknown. Things that don’t fit into reality. The impossible. So, The Mothman Prophesies freaked me out. And so did the House of Leaves book.

Part of why the book works is also part of why it drags at points. The book is supposedly a collection of all the materials that could be found relating to this mysterious case. So we read some boring letters and some pointless journal entries, and we read descriptions of some video tapes that were made. It’s a bit like Blair Witch but in book form.

The story revolves around this house that’s too big. The inner dimensions are larger than the outer dimensions of the house can account for. See, that’s creepy. The more the owners look into this strange issue, the more the house seems to grow. But only on the inside. See? Creepy. Soon they’re off exploring whole huge underground passages in the dark and doing all kinds of other incredibly stupid but definitely scary things.

This one, in all honesty, isn’t going to be everyone’s cup of tea. But in the end I really liked it. I read it in the midst of summer, often during daylight, during a happy time in my life. And it still freaked me out. So either this book is totally creepy, or I’m a big wuss. (No voting on that, please, at least until you’ve read the thing.)