NIGHTMARES COME AT NIGHT: ELEVEN BOOKS FOR HALLOWEEN by Matthew Kinlin
Nightmares come at night. The poster for Halloween III: Season of the Witch shows the silhouettes of three children walking in Halloween costumes against a red night. A ghoulish apparition evaporates above them into electric blue. The tagline at the bottom of the poster reads: “The night no one comes home.” Here are some recommended books that approach horror and other areas of eeriness in new and unexpected ways. Eleven lost souls drifting into darkness. The night goes on forever. Kier-La Janisse, House of Psychotic Women: An Autobiographical Topography of Female Neurosis in Horror and Exploitation Films (Fab Press, 2012) Kier-La Janisse’s seminal House of Psychotic Women rewrites the rules of the game with an autobiographical take on the neurotic women that populate horror and exploitation films. Opening with a shocking account from childhood of witnessing her mother being raped, she weaves this into a discussion of The Entity. In this 1982 film, Barbara Hershey plays a single mother who is raped by a poltergeist but no one, including her own therapist, believes her. With great skill, Janisse raises important questions about self-blame and guilt. She goes on to explore how films, often disregarded for their portrayal of women, actually deal with the complex experiences of women in a variety of ways: difficult sibling relationships and the doppelgängers of Robert Altman’s 3 Women, shifting attitudes to female alcoholism and trauma in Let’s Scare Jessica to Death. Janisse argues that rape revenge films could be seen as a pushback against male-driven architecture and the reclaiming of public space. A section of the book is dedicated to the “pallid and sickly looking” Mimsy Farmer, who perfectly encapsulates the typical neurotic and bears a striking physical resemblance to Janisse’s own mother. There are no easy answers to trauma, as the end of The Entity indicates. House of Psychotic Women is a powerful and extremely moving work that offers an important lens to an expansive understanding of horror and female experience. Kevin Killian, Argento Series (Pilot Press, 2023) Kevin Killian’s poetry collection Argento Series offers a haunting take on the work of the Italian maestro Dario Argento, with poems named after his many films, such as INFERNO and PHENOMENA, whilst others reference actors and central themes. Killian cleverly, and with wry humour, repositions the visual horror of Argento, with its lush scenes of crimson butchered bodies, to the AIDS crisis. He describes, “nasty patches on my epidermis like four flies / on gray velvet.” Bodies of friends and lovers break apart, “wasted and angry in death.” A killer somewhere in the apartment. The approach of unspeakable terror. In HOUSE OF WAX, Killian writes, “Give me back her floating eyes / I’ll put them in my shadow box / and build a new face around them / smiling and screaming / mouth open.” In Argento Series, the masked killer is AIDS. It runs rampant through its pages, “white, with veiny streaks of red.” Decadent bodies come apart like fabric; “a corsage of pink crinkles rather like the asshole of Tommy.” A beautiful boy led on a bed enacts a macabre ritual of desire. Killian concludes, “Death looks more like a person than he used to.” It’s in the blood now. As Derek McCormack summarises in his excellent introduction, “Kevin got what he wanted from Argento: an ambience of brutal bloodiness… he gave Argento’s oeuvre AIDS.” Naomi Falk, The Surrender of Man (Inside the Castle, 2025) Liberated from the sterile confines of academic discussion, Naomi Falk approaches 18 artworks with refreshing openness, vulnerability and questioning spirit. The stunning typeface and formatting, from the superlative Inside the Castle, matches the gothic tone of Falk’s prose. In her prologue, she muses on the limits of writing. Words are not enough. With shades of Clarice Lispector, she articulates the immediacy of her own experience as, “It leaves my body with scorching fury, white hot. I am screaming.” In her metaphysical treatise on language and self, she poignantly asks, “There are no oceans to cross, so where do I come ashore?” An uncertain captain, Falk finds 18 shorelines to head towards: the mute and quiet loneliness of an Alfred Kubin drawing, the uncanny valley of a Louise Bourgeious sculpture, Bruce Nauman as reminiscent of Saw II, her great love and admiration of abstract master Helen Frankenthaler whose painting Trojan Gates resembles, “an eruption bled into the world.” Falk smartly identifies her own role in the art she sails towards. An ocean beneath reveals her own fluctuating reflection. She writes, “I am experimenting with degrees of perceiving myself.” In stunning moments of poetic description (“Death was an unwashed sheet”), Falk heads into the unknown. She elaborates on her own alterity, “The words have unravelled me, everything I loved. I am that which I fear, destroyer of all I touch.” Each person creates and destroys all meaning. A reflection in the water: angel and demon. Ansgar Allen, Midden Hill (Schism2 Press, 2025) “Our assignment was this. To record what the islanders did and what they said.” Ansgar Allen’s Midden Hill offers the mind-bending dictation of a patient to his doctor about his time spent on an island with a midden, an incredible refuse hill, in the centre. Reminiscent of J.G. Ballard’s Concrete Island, Allen offers a confounding examination of civilisation and its discontents. The midden on the island is described as the dumping ground for the entire planet, made up of “everything every culture has expelled from itself.” An abject zone that “contains all defilements, all forbidden objects, all expulsions.” The book opens with a quote from Mary Douglas, an anthropologist who writes about purity and uncleanliness, and the rituals of purification central to modern cultures. There is a system to man’s filth. His safety is predicated on his daily attempts to expel waste and form himself in opposition to this. The island seems to place all of that in jeopardy. It carries perverse rituals of its own, mirrored in the vortical writing of Allen, as his visitors navigate this land of symbolic chaos: the burning and inhalation of a mysterious weed, the appalling significance of a peeled egg. In a way, the book captures something of Kafka’s The Castle; an outsider caught in an alien system, tunnels and tunnels of endless rot. David Kuhnlein, Ezra’s Head (Tragickal, 2025) David Kuhnlein is the master of surprise. Every sentence of his work is without compass, each paragraph leads to unexpected realms. In this collection, he offers nine short stories, one longer story, and then his novella, Ezra’s Head. Throughout the short stories, Kuhnlein draws arresting and haunting images, such as, “We called each other murderer, swirled one another’s faces like red paint.” He constantly provides head-spinning descriptions of experience; “Life felt like leaning out the window of a dream.” His imagery helps illuminate his character’s complex relationships with the physical body. This finds its apex in the novella that concludes the book. Ezra’s Head is the story of Redd, who “to kill himself, he gulped a cornucopia of barbiturates, chased by every ocean.” During this failed suicide attempt, deep within a coma, Redd enters an unknown zone overseen by severed heads, where “his lips were soldered shut by a chemical solution. He looked down at the ox bones dangling from his neck.” Death seems even more terrifying than the misery of living. Coming out of his coma, Redd attempts to exist for the following year; liminal and between worlds. “Are orbs souls?” a Hare Krishna follower asks, at one point. Metaphysically queasy, still adrift; “Redd’s skin felt screwed on.” The novella builds and builds to its violent conclusion. Nightmarish, Kuhnlein’s severed heads float forever in judgement. They look and ask, “Try to describe the nothingness that you imagined would exist for you beyond the veil. We’ll wait.” Can the dead ever die? Thomas Kendall, The Autodidacts (Whiskey Tit, 2022) As with How I Killed the Universal Man, Thomas Kendall has an incredible ability to take noir and other genre tropes into new and unexpected places. We begin The Autodidacts with the spooky disappearance of a man living in a lighthouse and the finding of his notebook. The obvious path would be a standard detective or mystery story but instead, Kendall provides a complex web of intergenerational stories of loss covered in “dust and detritus clashing everywhere.” Kendall’s prose weaves a Proustian dance. Slowly, it feels like a memory we can almost recall, “something that he—Lawrence—can’t recall the purpose of recalling.” The push-pull of grief, the swelling isolation, is all mirrored by the ocean. When, “Emily exhales. Really it is the tide of herself going out.” A deep sadness and sense of disconnect orbits around the lighthouse of every character, each flickering beneath pale fogs. As Mark Fisher writes in Ghosts of My Life: Writings on Depression, Hauntology and Lost Futures, where he makes links between depression and neoliberalism; “The past cannot be forgotten, the present cannot be remembered.” Characters, like life, look for answers and closure in a world that often denies this. In beautiful and tender prose, Kendall captures small moments of searching between his lost souls that realise, “other people are mirages.” We invent our own lives and ultimately, the deaths of each other. Paul Curran, Generation Bloodbath (Apocalypse Party, 2022) A massacred desert pit of viper blood and kerosene. Paul Curran offers more nightmare fuel in Generation Bloodbath; the horrific account of a recent regime change and revolutionary movement known only as Generation Bloodbath. Reminiscent of Pierre Guyotat’s Eden, Eden, Eden and Kathy Acker’s accelerated science-fiction Empire of the Senseless, Curran describes a territory where, “Chunks of uncooperative corpse-waste flooded the desert surrounding the interrogation camp.” Presenting as a numbered list, akin to a revolutionary manifesto, but one that ultimately negates itself: “The resistance manifesto’s last page calls for an end to manifestos.” An atrocity exhibition where, “amputating the hands of infants symbolised new-regime superiority.” The book feels relevant to the regimes of extermination we have seen currently. New administrations of rats and corpses. With exquisite prose and sickening imagery, Curran paints an apocalyptic tapestry of bodies evaporating into black ash. Missiles laser-guided through green night. Blood and blood and blood. Total non-existence. As Curran writes, “Generation Bloodbath is the end of time.” V.M. Harrigan, The Isolationist and Other Stories (Manifold House, 2025) Harrigan begins his impressive collection of short stories with the startling and shocking “Demon, 1966”, which opens with the incredible lines, “I just want to wake up. So I do.” This reality of wakefulness is brought into question throughout the unfolding story, an ambivalence which haunts and multiplies towards its devastating conclusion. Harrigan’s tales are often slyly humorous, such as “Indecipherable Black Metal Logo”, which follows an evil entity known simply as Nameless. The medieval entity possesses a number of hosts, only to feel seen and finally recognised centuries later, when a young boy scribbles down a black metal logo for his album. With its impressive hauntological artwork from Manifold House, The Isolationist and Other Stories evokes vintage BBC science-fiction from the 1970s. Its varied range of horror and speculative fiction feels like skipping television channels at 2am in the dark. There are moments of poetic beauty found here too, such as “I Will Have My Crown”, a story about telepathic nuns, where Harrigan writes, “The stars are dim but the shadows between them many.” One to devour. Tom Over, The Comfort Zone and Other Safe Spaces (Hybrid Sequence Media, 2025) Tom Over’s The Comfort Zone manages to meld revolting, eye-popping moments of splatter with poignant and challenging questions about human relationships. The ironically titled “The Vegetarians” takes J.G. Ballard’s High Rise even higher and asks how far a couple would go when the world descends into chaos and all they have left is the domestic space they once created, the bodies they loved each other with. As Bataille writes, “A kiss is the beginning of cannibalism.” Pulpy and fun, stories like “Phylum” feature bodies exploding in waves of orange slime, reminiscent of Stuart Gordon’s bubblegum pink From Hell and Carpenter’s alien mutants. Sexual insecurity, the limits of the human body, the uneasy relationship between fantasy and technology; Over offers perceptive insights into the cryptic riddles of the physical. His bodies are always at the point of rupture: birth, defecation, ejaculation. It’s so wet in here. Thirteen zones of seduction and repulsion. A modern classic. Ivy Grimes, Glass Stories (Grimscribe Press, 2024) In his 1976 film Heart of Glass, Werner Herzog presents an 18th century Bavarian town that has fallen under the spell of the ruby glass they produce. Famously, Herzog went so far as to have all of his actors hypnotised when they were learning their lines, so they might appear even more entranced. Ivy Grimes performs a similar trick in her collection Glass Stories where she examines the magical properties of glass in strange and compelling ways: a war of competing blessings between grandmothers during a friend’s labour, a ring buried with a deceased partner, trauma dissolved away in blinding jewels. Grimes has an impressive grasp of story, each one operating like a modern fairy tale akin to Angela Carter or Leonora Carrington, offering startling images and lines, such as “What was the point of having a face if it went away?” Her female characters navigate troubling, often horrific circumstances. Sometimes, the pull is too strong and they cannot look away from a dazzling, opalescent gem; “She was lost, so she had to let the glass world take her.” Eerie and compelling. Logan Berry, Doom is the House Without a Door (Inside the Castle, 2025) Marx famously wrote, “Capital is dead labour which, vampire-like, lives only by sucking living labour, and lives the more, the more labour it sucks.” Logan Berry follows the embers of his previous work Casket Flare further with this new work, titled after an incredible Emily Dickinson line. Doom is the House Without a Door reads like Artaud applying for a bank loan. It presents a series of diary entries from his protagonist who, following the advice of his Zoom therapist, begins to document the daily horror of his family life. Berry’s interest in the overlap between the corporate and occult finds a perfect balance here, sketching his narrator’s relationship with his children and wife who, “manages a fleet of programmers designing AI content moderators for a fintech start-up.” He muses on her, “beamed to her teams’ computer screens, her waifish face dispersed in spectral pixels.” Technology as magic(k). There are moments of amethyst-dark poetry, “The demon met me in the form of a smiling pastel purple diamond: the icon of my gambling app,” and acid black humour throughout, “My wife refuses to let me shoot her, which is strange because she’s basically a sentient selfie stick.” The debts begin to rack up as the narrator submits to vampiric capital. He is just a vessel that golden coins fall through; a carcass riddled with cryptocurrencies. As Berry posits, “Our future-corpses rehearse through us.”
