Penguin Horror Series: Monsters lurking within us all...

In his introduction to the Penguin Horror series, Guillermo Del Toro writes, “To learn what we fear is to learn who we are. Horror defines our boundaries and illuminates our souls.” This is also true of society at large — horror can illuminate cultural anxieties, the fears and worries of a particular time and place. I thought back to some of my favourite horror books — ones that took me across the world and to different times, blending supernatural horrors with very real and relatable dangers, and, of course, all while giving me a good scare.

Mariana Enriquez’s Our Share of Night, translated from Spanish by Megan McDowell, is such an ambitious book that it’s hard to describe: it’s about a cult in search of immortality, a father and son who have unique powers, and a mysterious darkness that lurks behind closed doors. The narrative moves backwards and forwards in time, as we meet new characters or meet the same ones at different points in their lives. 

But aside from the supernatural, it’s also the story of decades of Argentina’s complicated history, set before and after the years of military dictatorship. In an interview with The Guardian, Enriquez said, “It’s very difficult to write about Argentina using only realism.” Instead, she uses the codes of horror to explore both real and imagined violence — deaths occur at the hands of mysterious forces, but the characters are also haunted by the victims of war and political power. It ends up not as a perfect political allegory, but rather an experiential map of a moment in time. Some of the descriptions of the darkness in Our Share of Night still haunt me, but so do the very real emotional journeys that these characters — who, after 600 pages, felt like friends — live through.

Michael McDowell’s Blackwater series takes the form of an expansive Southern Gothic family saga. Written originally in the 80s and republished in six volumes by Penguin, this is the story of the Caskey family across five decades, living on the banks of the river in the town of Perdido, Alabama.

During a devastating flood, high up in a room slowly filling with water, Oscar Caskey finds a mysterious woman, Elinor, and is instantly enamoured. At times, Blackwater plays like a classic family drama, as Elinor clashes with Oscar’s mother, the powerful Caskey matriarch, and the family grows older, richer, and more powerful. But behind it all lurks a mysterious horror, tied to Elinor and to the ever-present, ever-flowing river.

Much like Our Share of Night, Blackwater is difficult to slot into any one category. The series isn’t perfect — the introduction to the republished books acknowledges, for example, Michael McDowell’s backgrounding of characters of colour — but it is full of fascinating observations on patriarchy, marriage, parenthood, family dynamics (many characters are queer-coded, if not outrightly queer), mercy, and justice. The horror elements, which range from ghostly apparitions to indescribable creatures, are treated almost matter-of-factly, which makes it all the more chilling.  

In Violet Kupersmith’s Build Your House Around My Body, two women vanish across time — one in 1986, and the other in 2011. This is the story of these two interlinked disappearances, told across decades, as characters weave in and out of each other’s storylines. Part mystery, part ghost story, and part feminist fable, it draws on decades of Vietnamese history and folklore. Kupersmith hints at connections between characters and places, which makes for a delightfully confounding puzzle-box of a novel, leaving much to the reader to draw strands together. In Build Your House, the horrors of colonialism, misogyny, class, and racism are on equal footing with monsters made of smoke, two-headed snakes, and shapeshifters. 

Guillermo Del Toro writes of how leaning into the fantastic can ‘make flesh’ what would otherwise be metaphor or allegory.” This means engaging with concepts on a real, bodily level — a fear represented as a vampire, or a ghost, or a cult in search of immortality. These stories live in the tension between the symbolic and the real, which means you can read them as metaphors, as ways to “learn who we are” — or just to give yourself fodder for your next nightmare.

Piqued is a monthly column in which the staff of Champaca Bookstore bring us unheard voices and stories from their shelves. The reviewer is a writer and illustrator.