Guest Editor, Catriona Ward

Here at the LoveReading Team we don’t just admit to being in a-whole-heap-of-love with Catriona Ward’s writing, we SHOUT it with great gusto from the tallest of rooftops. If you’ve not yet introduced yourself to her novels, she offers a unique blend which includes gothic, horror, and supernatural, novels that burrow deep into thoughts and turn on a creeping all-pervading frost of fear. I first met her particular blend of beautifully chilling eloquence when I read her debut Rawblood. This excruciatingly moving and original tale of haunting love and destruction was truly enthralling and memorable. Hmmmm, we were on to something special here! Rawblood was followed by Little Eve, and then came along The Last House on Needless Street, and Sundial. The award-winning The Last House on Needless Street was one of my books of the year in 2021. Almost too difficult to describe in case I inadvertently add spoilers, its twisted poignancy squeezed, taunted, and heightened emotions, it continues to stay with me, tucked into my heart and soul. And then there is  Sundial, which absolutely floored me, it is a wow of a tale and right up at the top of my favourite books of 2022. So exquisitely haunting it hurts, Sundial slithers into thoughts and carves out a spot to make itself at home. Intensely dark and blazingly beautiful, this story about the love that can hold us together, or shatter us into pieces deserves to win all the awards going. Next on the scene in April 2023 is Looking Glass Sound, and I have ‘come here my precious’ vibes shivering from tip to toe in anticipation of its glory. 

Catriona Ward was born in Washington, DC and grew up in the United States, Kenya, Madagascar, Yemen, and Morocco. She read English at St Edmund Hall, Oxford and is a graduate of the Creative Writing MA at the University of East Anglia. Her fourth novel, the gothic thriller Sundial (2022 - Viper, Tor Nightfire) was Observer Thriller of the Month and a USA Today, CNN and Apple Books selection for best new fiction. Stephen King called Sundial ‘Authentically terrifying…. Do not miss this book.’ 

Ward’s third breakout novel The Last House on Needless Street (2021 - Viper, Tor Nightfire) won the August Derleth Prize and has been shortlisted for the Kitschies, the British Book Awards, the South Bank Award, and the World Fantasy Award. Esquire magazine listed it as one of the top 25 best horror novels of all time. Rights have been sold in twenty-nine territories, it was a Richard and Judy Book Club selection, a Times Book of the Month, Observer Book of the Month, March Editor’s Pick on Radio 4’s Open Book, a Between the Covers BBC2 book club selection and a Sunday Times bestseller. The Last House on Needless Street is being developed for film by Andy Serkis and Jonathan Cavendish’s production company, The Imaginarium. Stephen King said of The Last House on Needless Street, ‘I was blown away. It's a true nerve-shredder that keeps its mind-blowing secrets to the very end. Haven't read anything this exciting since GONE GIRL.’ 

Ward’s second novel Little Eve (2018 - W&N, 2022 Tor Nightfire) won the 2019 Shirley Jackson Award and the August Derleth Prize at the British Fantasy Awards. It was a Barnes and Noble best Horror Book of 2022 and a Guardian best book of 2018. Nightfire will publish Little Eve for the first time in the US in 2022. Ward’s debut Rawblood (2015 - W&N, Sourcebooks) also won the 2016 August Derleth, making her the only woman to have won the prize three times. Her short stories have appeared in numerous anthologies and have been shortlisted for various prizes. She lives in London and Devon. 

'Cat on a hot tin roof' doesn’t really do justice to my feelings while waiting for Catriona’s Guest Editor choices. As you can probably tell, she is a favourite author of mine, so I was truly excited to discover her recommendations. I absolutely adore her choice of theme, and the feeling she experiences when reading these five books, is exactly how I feel when I immerse myself in hers. I have great pleasure in handing you over to our Winter Guest Editor, and offer the warmest of welcomes to Catriona:

*

Winter always feels like a time of transformation, to me. The slow cold death of the old year, in preparation for the birth of a new. I wanted to choose books that either transform themselves narratively or leave the reader feeling transformed – or did this reader, anyway. I love books that leave the world a different place than you found it - all of the following had a profound effect on me as a person, and as a writer. I emerged from them feeling that things would never be quite the same again.

My choices tend towards the uncanny – gothic and horror are all about transformation. And what better time to lean into eeriness than this, the nadir of year, while the next lies ahead of us, gestating in the dark?

What I love about this kind of literature is its ability to be a light in the darkness, a torch held aloft to lead us through fear, back into the light. We read to find ourselves, and gothic and horror reflect back the fear we keep in the depths of us – that shameful, private fear. These books open the door to those difficult feelings we try so hard to stifle. I feel less alone after reading them - I hope others will too. 

We Have Always Lived in the Castle by Shirley Jackson

The first paragraph of Shirley Jackson’s novel is one of the best character introductions in literature – and what a character Merricat Blackwood is. 

My name is Mary Katherine Blackwood. I am eighteen years old and I live with my sister Constance. I have often thought that with any luck at all I could have been born a werewolf because the two middle fingers on my hands are the same length, but I have had to be content with what I had. I dislike washing myself and dogs and noise. I like my sister Constance, and Richard Plantaganet, and Amanita Phalloides, the death-cup mushroom. Everyone else in my family is dead.

Merricat lives with her sister Constance and Uncle Julian outside the village – the rest of her family were poisoned six years ago by arsenic in the sugar. Constance was tried and acquitted, the villagers don’t speak to them, now. They live a charmed, isolated life. Though the two sisters are very different, the love between Constance and Merricat is deeply touching. However, when their cousin Charles arrives, so do discipline and patriarchy. 

The book is both grounded and powered by dark sympathetic magic - Merricat buries silver dollars, her baby teeth and blue marbles at various locations on the family property, as ‘safeguards,’ to protect herself and Constance. The eponymous Castle of the title doesn’t materialise until an act of transformation, during the novel’s gloriously odd ending.

Get in Trouble by Kelly Link 

I came to Kelly Link’s short stories through an earlier collection, Magic for Beginners. I felt the world shift around me as I read. No other author, for me, has so powerfully fused together the fantastical with the human in narrative. 

I prefer the word 'reveal' to the word 'twist', because that’s what it should do – reveal the true nature of the story you’re reading. There is always a moment at the end of each Kelly Link story when the world transforms and the truth of things is revealed in all its unexpected terror and beauty. 

Get in Trouble, her Pulitzer shortlisted collection, changed the way I write, and maybe even how I see the world, a little. Whether it’s a superhero whose only power is to hover a few feet off the ground, or a family trapped into a fairy bargain in rural Kentucky, Kelly Link makes the fantastical seem real, and vice versa. ‘The Ghost Boyfriend,’ about a new kind of doll for teenage girls, ‘I Can See Right through You,’ about an aging movie star visiting his ex-girlfriend on the set of her ghost hunting reality TV show, and ‘Two Houses,’ about a haunted spaceship are particular favourites of mine. The final story about pocket worlds is almost a metaphor for the book – you slip in and out of her universes with ease, dazzled by each one.

The Five by Haillie Rubenhold

This phenomenal work of painstaking scholarship transforms our centuries-long obsession with the crimes of Jack the Ripper, focusing a lens on the lives of the canonical five victims: Mary-Anne Nichols, Annie Chapman, Elizabeth Stride, Catherine Eddowes and Mary Jane Kelly. Rubenhold exposes false, deeply embedded historical assumptions about these women and unveils the prurience and misogyny through which the cases are often viewed. The beauty of this book is often in the meticulous detail, which brings the women vividly to life. Haillie Rubenhold seems to know so much, not just about her subject but about people. She shows you, slowly and gently, the humanity of the Five, as well as the nature of the age. 

It’s a moving book. Death is the ultimate transformation, and Rubenhold illuminates each woman’s passing. I was in tears as I read the last few pages – which is simply a list of the possessions – some practical, others small personal treasures - that each woman had on her when she was found.

Mrs March by Virginia Feito

I’ve rarely read a book that gave me so much writer’s envy as Mrs March. From the first page, I kept thinking – I wish I’d written this. There’s not too much I can say about the plot without spoiling some of the novel’s most surprising pleasures, but I’ll try. 

Mrs March, preparing for a party to celebrate her husband’s latest novel, discovers that the main character in the novel, an aging prostitute who nobody wants to sleep with, is based on her. This sets off a chain of speculation and increasingly macabre events that leave the reader wound tight as a spring – and Mrs March begins to suspect that her husband, George, may in fact be a murderer. Or is Mrs March going mad? We are distanced from our highly unreliable narrator until the very last page by never knowing her first name. Yet Virginia Feito simultaneously hews us so closely into her protagonists’ perspective that it becomes an act of horror in itself. The prose is spare, hallucinatory, peppered with razor sharp insight. It’s one of the best evocations I have ever read of anxiety, the inner gallop of panic induced by the prospect of making a decision. Mrs March’s gradual transformation over the course of the book is agonising to witness. And it is deeply, deliciously gothic.

Watership Down by Richard Adams

It’s baffling that this story is considered children’s book. Watership Down is about a group of rabbits looking for a home after their warren is destroyed. Around this simple, iconic adventure plot Adams weaves a narrative about integrity and justice, shot through with idealism and longing for a better society. I’ve never read a better reflection on what it means to be human than this book about rabbits. 

Like many, I first learned about suffering and death from Watership Down, but I also learned about the comfort of friendship and community. And I learned about the beauty of the British countryside. I grew up in the US, Madagascar, Kenya, Yemen and Morocco so as a child my only familiarity with cowslips, changing seasons, the breeze in the grass on the high Down on a clear day - was through Adams’s book. There’s a Welsh word, hiraeth, which loosely translates to longing for a home you’ve never had. As a lonely child Watership Down made me feel hiraeth for the green British countryside, populated by its velvet-eared rabbit characters with all their fierce loyalty and flaws. It still does, just as the end of the book, with Hazel’s final transformation, still pierces the heart.