The Thompson Library & Archives Blog

AKA capitalism meets cannibalism Bazterrica’s second novel is a dystopian horror story in which a virus infects all animal species, rendering them inedible. The country quickly (suspiciously so?) transitions to state-mandated cannibalism, whereby humans are sold, bred, and processed as the exclusive meat source. Our protagonist, Marcos, is a meat supplier who slowly starts to question the morality of the industry he’s been desensitized to, after being gifted a female F.G.P. (First Generation Pure) and developing a relationship with her. Readers follow Marcos through every step of the butchering process as “heads” of livestock are shaved, flayed, sawed open, disemboweled, and quartered until the resulting slabs of meat on little styrofoam trays in the grocery store bear no resemblance to their original form. Vegans will rejoice at the critique on the modern meat industry and the questions this book presents: Is our love for meat limited by the animal it comes from? Will the line between livestock and living creature be crossed if and when our humanity is replaced by hunger? I enjoyed how grossed out this book made me feel. If you enjoy an unreliable narrator, a barbaric dystopia serving as commentary on our present reality, and reading about humans who’ve lost their humanity, you’ll probably enjoy Tender is the Flesh. It goes without saying, but don’t read this if you have a weak stomach.

AKA folk horror fairy tale (happy ending who?) Lapvona follows several inhabitants of a medieval village in Eastern Europe and their gloomy lives of toil, which intersect in unexpected ways. Thirteen year old Marek, deformed and abused by his shepherd father, believes his mother died in childbirth and has been raised by the village witch. After accidentally pushing his only friend off a cliff, Marek must pay the price for the death he inadvertently caused, and take his victim’s place as son of the depraved feudal lord, Villiam. Despite living in luxury while the rest of the village starves, things only go downhill (sorry, couldn't resist) for Marek after assuming his new role as castle prince. Long-buried secrets are unearthed, peasants play their part in Lord Villiam’s sickening games, and the line between reality and witchcraft is blurred as desperate times call for extremely desperate measures by the villagers. I had never read a book like this before and I’ve never read one since. Lapvona is dreary, dark, debauched, and horrifying, yet captivating and unforgettable. Don’t read this if you want something lighthearted or cozy; the only comfort you can take in Lapvona is Moshfegh’s vivid storytelling makes up for the bleakness of her plot.

AKA serial sniffer Disgusting, gruesome, and absurd, Perfume is a historical horror classic that combines sociopathy with science, nihilism with nastiness, and fact with olfactory. If you want a truly weird reading experience, look- and smell- no further.

Unassuming orphan Jean-Baptiste Grenouille harbors a secret gift: he possesses a remarkable sense of smell, able to distinguish thousands of distinct scents across miles and miles of 18th-century Paris (a blessing and a curse). He trains as an apprentice to a perfumer in Grasse and hones his craft of combining the scents of everyday items to invent new, unique smells, mentally cataloging his data in an organized system reminiscent of Sherlock Holmes’ “mind palace.” Jean-Baptiste begins to realize some of his scent creations have influence over other people, whom he hates without exception, and he experiments by wearing his original perfumes to study their influence on the behavior of those around him. After years of developing his olfactory power and memorizing all the city’s smells, Jean-Baptiste is captivated by a new, entrancing scent, that of a virgin girl. He becomes obsessed with retaining her scent and strangles her, staying beside her corpse until the scent fades.

This murder is only the first in Jean-Baptiste’s sociopathic spree of 26 eventual victims, the last of which is traced back to him by the police. When his collection of his previous victims’ hair and clothing is discovered, Jean-Baptiste is sentenced to death. En route to his execution, Jean-Baptiste dabs on his strongest fragrance yet, created by combining his victims’ scents, and the result is intoxicating to the townspeople. His persecutors, despite having damning evidence of his guilt, are now so enamored with Jean-Baptiste, so convinced by the innocence he now exudes, that they acquit him of his crimes and torture a false confession out of his innocent employer, who they hang instead. The power of Jean-Baptiste’s scent only grows, compelling people to worship him like a god, thus fueling his contempt for humanity. He returns, full of hate, to the fish town he was born in, intending to die in a most dramatic way. I can honestly say I never knew what to expect next from this story, and the ending was no exception.

As if the graphic descriptions of bodily filth weren’t enough to keep you hooked, mass orgies, cannibalism, and the literal mountain-top hermitage kept my nose buried in this book (sorry). Fragrant with beautiful prose, while reeking with the stench of our protagonist’s misanthropy, Perfume is not for the faint of heart.

AKA don’t hold your breath The name Stephen King is one of the most accessible names in horror. Even nonreaders probably know a few of his books, or have seen the movie adaptations. Fewer people, however, have heard of Richard Bachman, King’s pen name he wrote under between 1977 and 1985 in an attempt to increase his sales without saturating the market with the King “brand.” As far as I can tell, The Jaunt was never published under the Bachman pseudonym, but it retains the feeling of early 80s King: short, dark, and a little cheesy (but I guess some things never change). Published in the Twilight Zone Magazine in 1981, The Jaunt is a story I read in our own library’s atrium as a freshman, instead of responding to three classmates’ discussion board posts. This type of short science fiction story is one of my favorite ways to consume horror, especially if I need a little hit without wanting to commit to a novel.

In the distant future, humans have developed a teleportation technology called “jaunting,” which has enabled colonization of the solar system. Businessman Mark Oates, his wife, and their two children are traveling to Mars for work. As the anesthesiologists are making their rounds knocking out travelers before they teleport them, Mark tries to calm his children, jaunting for their first time, by telling them a sugarcoated historical account of the jaunt’s invention: In 1987, a scientist discovered the technology to teleport when he accidentally jaunted two of his fingers across the room. Although the procedure functioned smoothly during testing with inanimate objects, live mice couldn’t complete the jaunt without experiencing erratic side effects before sudden heart attack, if they came out alive at all. While these kinks never quite got ironed out in the lab, the government soon took over the experiment and decided to proceed with human testing on death row prisoner Rudy Foggia, whom Oates conveniently omits from his story. Foggia was the first person to be sent through the jaunt machine conscious, without the anesthesia administered to the rest of the human test subjects. He successfully jaunted, but he emerged… changed.

This story is a bit of a slow burn but the ending pays off. If you’ve read King, you know he likes a big finish. If you can get past the clunky dialogue and aren’t concerned with asking technical physics questions regarding the plausibility of something like a teleportation machine, The Jaunt can leave you feeling pleasantly horrified. I hadn’t seen it at the time, but I now refer to the way this story and many other speculative horror tales make me feel as “the Black Mirror feeling,” a specific combination of dark hopelessness, unsatisfying tragedy, and pessimistic pity for the unfortunate inhabitants of our doomed future. Happy reading!

AKA 709 pages of ‘what the bleep is going on' - AKA a haunted house like you’ve never seen it before - AKA Is the Navidson Record real and if so, where can I watch it? Do I even want to watch it?

I don’t recommend House of Leaves to anyone without giving them my disclaimer, but perhaps not the type you’d expect. To put it simply, House of Leaves is a doozy. Overwhelming, chaotic, challenging in subject matter and presentation, this novel took me two attempts to read over the course of half a decade. The first time, I didn’t make it past the first fifty pages. A few years later I was determined, I was ready to take on the House if it was the last thing I did… a bit like the characters who inhabit it (ooh, foreshadowing!).

The structure of House of Leaves is a bit like a Russian nesting doll, a story within a story within a story, like a Wes Anderson movie without the pastel color palette and deadpan humor. Much is narrated from the perspective of Johnny Truant, a directionless tattoo artist who finds a trunk full of unorganized papers written by his friend’s neighbor, a blind hermit called Zampano. Zampano has died before completing his manuscript notes on a documentary film called the Navidson Record, and Johnny decides to put them in order. Simple enough, right? But the story’s main plot follows Pulitzer prize-winning news photographer, Will Navidson, who relocates his family to Virginia in an attempt to save his relationship with his girlfriend. Things are going pretty well until Will, making some repairs to his new house, realizes that its interior measures wider than the exterior. Doors, closets, and impossibly long hallways appear in once-blank walls of the house, and the mood quickly shifts as the Navidsons realize they’re paying a mortgage for a sentient labyrinth.

At this point in your typical spookhouse story, readers might wonder why the family doesn't move out of a house that’s obviously haunted. We’ve all found ourselves yelling at the screen for the movie characters to use common sense and get out before even creepier things start happening, even though we know our entertainment and the story’s subsequent events depend on their naivete. Pride, stubbornness, and a doomed-cat curiosity compel Will Navidson to assemble a crew of explorer-documentarians to record their attempt to map out the house’s maze like hallways, dead ends, and empty open rooms sometimes estimated to be over a mile from wall to wall (did I mention the House rearranges its floor plan at will?). Their attempt goes about as well as you’d expect. All of this is interrupted by Johnny Truant’s frustration over arranging notes about a film he can’t find any information on and personally doesn’t believe exists, his correspondence with his asylum-bound mother who tried to kill him in childhood, and his sexual escapades and infatuation with a stripper called Thumper, which are probably the least interesting parts of the book.

If you’ve read this far in my recommendation, you might as well read the book. If you like the backrooms, you should definitely read this book. If you feel compelled to accept my implicit challenge, nay, my dare, that only the bravest of the brave will read House of Leaves, then please do so.

A few things you should know before reading: The subplot in Johnny’s footnotes and letters from his mother can be skipped entirely on your first readthrough. To reiterate, the main horror story is Zampano’s account of the Navidson Record; Johnny’s notes, ramblings, and personal anecdotes, though serving as a reprieve from the chaos of the Record, aren’t essential to understanding the Navidsons’ story. This book contains graphic violence and sex, but is a psychological nightmare overall. While I was reading it, I wasn’t feeling spooked, scared, or panicked in the way I’ve felt reading Stephen King or watching Blair Witch Project. Rather, a chronic sense of dread pervades the story, and a heavy, Lovecraftian doom shadows the characters, trying in vain to study something much greater than they can even comprehend. Like the titular house itself, House of Leaves is formatted to make you feel claustrophobic, disoriented, and to drive you insane. Some pages contain only a few words, others are completely blank. Others, still, are packed with perpendicular, overlapping text, text in the shape of objects, and footnotes and editors’ interjections so lengthy that they span different pages than the very text which they reference. I mean, the damn thing must be rotated to be read. While House of Leaves is undeniably chilling, don’t read this if you want a chill reading experience.