Why I made up my own 10 week study of horror fiction

I said to myself recently “I should read more horror fiction.” So, because I am, at heart, always a student, I whipped up a syllabus and reading list for myself. Over the next couple months, I will be taking an adventure through horror novels, from Gothic 18th century up to the “Golden age” of horror, the 1970s. And I hope to write about my journey on this blog.

People keep asking me why I would do this. “You won’t gain any actual credits with it, will you?” People keep saying to me. My only answer is that I am doing it for the fun of it. I want to read more, might as well focus my energies the same way I practiced it for years: by giving myself deadlines.

I hope to not only read more, but write more because of this excercise. I certainly hope that I will start updating my blog once a week.

So let’s start with the basics: What is horror fiction? Horror.org says that the definition of horror is “a painful and intense fear, dread, or dismay.” “It stands to reason, then that horror fiction is fiction that elicits that emotion in readers.”

I love my fiction eliciting emotion in me. That’s what makes reading fun.

Interestingly, I hate watching horror, but love reading it. When it’s got you on the edge of your seat, that’s when you know your having fun with a book. And nothing gets me to jump to the edge of my seat faster than a good scare.

This, in a nutshell, is why I’ve created this study. I want to learn all about the stories that have kept readers on their seats through the centuries. Because it will be a lot of fun.

The Dead Girls of Katie Alender’s world

Last week, I was eagerly awaiting a package from Amazon, a package that contained a book I had been excited to read for months. “The Dead Girls of Hysteria Hall”, Katie Alender’s new young adult thriller. I was so excited to get my hands on this book that when I opened the package, I rubbed my face on it like a cat. But maybe that’s getting too personal.

After a ceremonius book smell (t.m.i. again?) I started reading. In an hour, I’d read fifty pages, then put it away for the night. The next day I finished it. Such is the power of Katie Alender.

What is it that makes her books so tantalizing? For starters, her spunky heroines. “Dead Girls” boasts Delia, a regular teenager with a chip on her back because her parents are overbearing. Delia inherits a house, but not just any house, a retired asylum for girls, nicknamed “Hysteria Hall.”

The Piven Institute, with it’s dark history of mistreating patients and mysterious deaths, is, unsurprisingly, very haunted. When Delia starts meeting ghostly inhabitants, she finds it stocked with girls of all kinds: a southern debutante, a flapper with a dark past, and a sad mother. She finds there are good ghosts and bad ghosts, and ghosts that are just plain pests. Despite the other occupants of the hourse, Delia is on a mission, determined to learn more about her Aunt Cordelia, whom she corresponded with only briefly years before she left her a haunted insane asylum.

Alender is a pro at suspense building, an excellent tactic that keeps her readers on the edge of their seat, ready for the next chapter. It’s a ghosts world in this book, and that means creepy creatures of all kinds, from the disfigured little girl who stalks Delia, to black smoke monsters.

All six books that Alender has written clearly take place in the same canon universe, a universe where ghosts lurk around every corner and spunky teenage heroines have to deal with them. In her “Bad Girls Don’t Die” series, Alexis comes across not only bad-tempered spirits, but a poltergeist. Not all of Alender’s ghosts are bad though. In “Famous Last Words” an angry ghost is trying to warn Willa of a murderer. Alexis, despite her run-ins with nasty ghosts, comes to be close with her dead frenemy who helps her out in times of crisis. The dead girls living in the Piven institute are a combination of the two, the best and the worst of the oogly-booglys. Five out of her six books also make mention to the author and ghost expert Walter Sawamura, tying all the books together. It is clear that Alender found her niche in hauntings.

In “Dead Girls” Delia gets the opportunity to save her little sister Janie from a horrible fate. But first, she has to unravel the house’s troubled past as it tries harder and harder to claim everyone she loves. It is thrilling, creepy, and touching, all things that I’ve come to expect from Alender’s excellent stories.

If you haven’t explored Alender’s haunted world yet, then I suggest you pick up “Dead Girls” and settle in for a few hours of ravenous reading.