17 Days Until Halloween

I have another 2010 book to recommend for your Halloween reading: The House of Dead Maids by Clare B. Dunkle. The novel follows fictional 11-year-old Tabby as she's taken to become a maid at the distant and dilapidated Seldom House. There she encounters her very dead predecessors and her very live charge, a precocious and wayward little boy, whom she tries to protect from the sinister forces around them, as well as his own ignorance and willfulness. As the two unravel the secret of Seldom House, they discover that peril comes from forces far older and much closer than they could have imagined.

Dunkle nests her story within the larger context of the Brontës. According to the novel, the fictional child (who has all the courage and tenacity of Neil Gaiman's modern-day Coraline) grows up to be the "real life" adult Tabby who serves as the Brontë family's housekeeper at Haworth, the one who reportedly told the Brontë sisters dark and imaginative tales -- some, Dunkle implies, from firsthand experience. The author suggests that the "heathen git" child that Tabby protects at Seldom House is none other than the "real" Heathcliff, whom Emily Brontë later immortalized in her masterpiece Wuthering Heights.

In short, it's ideal reading for a dark and stormy night. You can read my full review here at Goodreads.



Thanks to cookiefleck for today's spooky picture!

Text of the Day: Today's short story is perfect for the season, "The Little Black Train" by Manly Wade Wellman (1903-1986).

Teaser: A ghost train running on the High Fork Railroad. Spawned by a curse during a love quarrel that ended in the murder of the engineer of the train. The Little Black Train is destined to come back and take away the guilty.

Read the complete story here.