Spooky Season Reading Wrap Up

I didn’t always like Halloween since everything that would be on tv around that time was a horror movie, and I’m too much of a chicken to watch horror. I would even get nightmares by watching movie trailers. A long with me just being fraidy my parents and family are very Christian and anything to do with witches, ghosts, vampires or anything spiritual and the occult that wasn’t tied to Christianity was automatically seen as evil. I remember once my even more religious aunt was against my parents taking us to watch the live action Scooby-doo in theatres.

I realise I have an interesting relationship with horror, even though I don’t like watching live action movies sometimes I could watch an animation and be okay and actually really enjoy it. I do like shows about the supernatural, which I would sneak and watch. And I do enjoy reading about the supernatural but still on the fence about horror.

I really felt the Halloween spirit this year though for probably the first time because so many of my favourite bookstagrammers, booktubers and bloggers all talked about some of the books that came out that they wanted to read that was Halloween-ish and that just made me hyped up about some of those books and also made me go back to books that have been sitting on my tbr that I’ve felt the urge to read this month.

🎃 Skin Folk by Nalo Hopkinson

This is a short story collection that featured many scary Caribbean duppies, a couple of retellings of European fairytales in a Caribbean or Caribbean diaspora contexts and a lot of horror, suspenseful stories.This has been on my tbr forever and I was planning to read in August but didn’t get the chance to. Idk why I take so long to read short story collections. I really really really enjoyed these stories my two favourite are The Glass Bottle Trick which was a really cool retelling of Bluebeard in a Jamaican context and Greedy Choke Puppy which is probably my favourite Soucouyant/Ol’ Higue story. Not all of them were supernatural though like the Fisherman which is an erotica-ish story that I really didn’t care for maybe because I was expecting some supernatural thing to happen and I was disappointed when it didn’t happened but also because the sex was just a bit awkward and unappealing. Ganger Ball though was an erotica supernatural story that made me super uncomfortable reading it but it’s a really good story though.

🎃 A Song of Wraiths and Ruins by Roseanne A. Brown

I fucking love this book. This is a fantasy 2 POV YA that’s based on West African folklore. It follows two characters Malik and Karina using the Solstasia festival, which is a sacred game held every 50 years, for their own ulterior motives. For Malik, the festival is a chance to save his younger sister after being abducted by an evil spirit held bent on seeking revenge to the ruling family. In order to save her, Malik has to kill the Princess of Ziran, Karina. Karina, after her mother was assassinated, is struck by grief and also not ready for the responsibility to take her place as leader. She plans to use ancient magic which requires the heart of a King which she plans to make one by choosing the winning prize for the Solstasia festival as her hand in marriage. Malik cons his way to the competition by using magic of his own in order to get close to Karina. This was all fun to read since they grow feelings for each other, but also try to kill each other. You don’t want them to do it, but you also want them to save the people they care about. It kept me on edge the entire time I was reading it. I really loved Malik despite the second-hand embarrassment he gave me because of his terrible social and general anxiety, which I related to a lot. Karina’s character is the common badass hothead character, and I found her to be an asshole most of the times but there were times I could empathise with her. There were so many twists and turns while reading this the ending was just really shocking and I can’t wait for book 2 which also has a gorgeous cover.

🎃 Mexican Gothic by Silvia Moreno-Garcia

This was an Adult horror/ gothic novel set in 1950s Mexico. The main character Noemí receives a strange distress letter from her sick newly wed cousin that she hasn’t spoken to in over a year. She heads to High Place which is a creepy ass Victorian house in Mexican countryside to see if her cousin is ok and try to get her cousin’s new family to get her psychiatric help. The entire family is strange and white and inhospitable towards her except the youngest family. During her stay she receives several strange dreams from past members of the house and a warning from a herbalist local to leave because the family is cursed. This was probably the creepiest story I’ve read this month and it was mehhhhh. I listened to the audiobook and I was a bit annoyed that they couldn’t at least do dialogue in a Mexican accent but could do it in a British accent. If there was no accent at all being done I would have glossed over it but you really went out of your way to do a British accent though for the British characters but not the Mexican characters? It was really slow paced, and it didn’t really grab me until chapter 20. The plot-line sort of had a Get Out vibe with so much incest. The creepy white family that isolate themselves from the local community is a familiar story that Caribbean people could relate to, and also the incest that happens within these types of families which stems from their racism.

🎃 The Ghost Squad by Claribel A. Ortega

This was a really fun story based on a Dominican-American experience. Lucely along with the help of her friend Syd, tries to save her ancestors who have been glitching. So she accidentally said a spell that woke up the unrested souls which brought malicious spirits throughout St. Augustine, Florida. In order to undo their mistake Lucely and Sid joins forces Babette, Syd’s witchy grandmother and Chunk, Babette’s fluffy cat, to try and reverse the curse. I really enjoyed Lucely’s larger spirit family they all had really fun personalities. The book also incorporated Halloween with a full moon just like this one so I really couldn’t have picked a better book to read on Halloween. It was scary and adventerous but not too scary (it’s a Middle grade book). The audiobook was fantastic. The Dominican accents were there for some of the characters and the narrator did a good job overall.

Non-reading ways I spent spooky season

I watched an Amazon Prime web series Juju because it had black witches. If you could get over the very low-budgetness of the series and not the best representation of Caribbean culture then you might also enjoy.

I also attended a virtual event A Caribbean and African ghost story tellings which was really fun and scary enjoying both fictional duppy stories by persons who attended and duppy stories from their personal experience.

Now I’m going to figure out what I’m going to read for Christmas.🤔