For Halloween season, these books explore our enduring fascination with monsters in new and surprising ways, from fresh takes on vampire tales to a bestiary that spans time and worlds. Monsters come in many forms and illuminate deeper truths about our fears and even our hopes.
Portland author Keith Rosson infuses his horror novels with the sensibility and pacing of crime fiction. “Coffin Moon,” which was recently optioned for TV by Jessica Biel and Paramount, starts in 1975, when Vietnam veteran Duane Minor opens the Last Call Tavern in Portland, unaware that this event will set him on a collision course with John Varley, a vampire born on the gritty Seattle streets a century earlier.
When Varley kills Duane’s wife, Heidi, Duane and Heidi’s adopted 13-year-old niece, Julia, become hellbent on revenge. As Duane and Julia sever themselves from the lives they knew in pursuit of a vicious creature who plays with human lives for sport, Rosson keeps the storytelling taut while grounding the action in the emotional resonance of family and grief.
Ito Romo opens his debut novella “Filth Eaters” on the neon-illuminated streets of a near-future, postapocalyptic New York City, where the Filth Eater vampire Doro is raging on the newest social media platform, enticing his audience with his anguish.
Filth Eaters are both gifted and cursed: Gifted with the ability to live a more “human” life, including bearing children, and cursed to carry the trauma of all that they and the Filth Eaters before them have consumed.
In a mere 145 pages, Romo brings the intimate and epic tale of Doro and his kind to life, weaving across centuries and continents to convey the cruelty of humanity and gruesome reality of vampirism. This installment in the vampire tradition mesmerizes with description and echoes of the Chicano experience.
In another busy corner of the world, Beijing’s Huihuáng Opera House prepares to put on “The Monkey King and the White Bone Demon.” In “Demon Song,” Pacific Northwest author Kelsea Yu spins a tale of dark magic, blending “The Phantom of the Opera” and Chinese folklore when 16-year-old American-born Megan flees to Beijing with her mother to escape a very human monster, her mother’s abusive partner. Huihuáng Opera House manager Wei offers them work and a place to stay — for a price.
What follows is a wonderful telling of a Faustian bargain — asking Megan and readers what price one would pay for safety, fame and fortune, and what one should sacrifice for art.
The glamour of the opera house is juxtaposed with luscious body horror, menacing nightmares and monsters of the human and fantastical variety; it is sure to appeal to teens and adults.
Not all monsters appear scary. South Korean horror author Cho Yeeun introduces a stuffed bear as a monstrous presence in “Teddy Bears Never Die,” translated by Sung Ryu. The novel invokes its central theme from the jump: “All stories start with money.”
Teenaged orphan Hwayoung is already subject to the rapacious whims of low-end jobs, indifferent authorities and a shady landlord in the wake of her mother’s death. Forced into a side gig by her landlord, Hwayoung narrowly escapes a deadly setup when a reanimated teddy bear from her past saves her and joins her on the run.
This offbeat horror novel mixes humor amid the scares, exploring supernatural and human monsters in a world where money and power truly are a matter of life or death.
Likewise, there is little more frighteningly unknown to us than that generalized monster commonly referred to as the other. “Other Terrors: An Inclusive Anthology,” curated by Bram Stoker Award-winning editors Vince A. Liaguno and Rena Mason, invites a variety of horror authors to share stories about how our fears of “the other” haunt us.
From Jennifer McMahon’s “Idiot Girls,” in which two girls exploring new love find a neighbor’s horrifying secret, to a slasher’s origin story in Stephen Graham Jones‘ “Tiddlywinks,” these stories plumb the depths of how our fears of the monstrous are truly calls coming from inside the house.
Icy Sedgwick’s monstrous bestiary “Ghostlore” reminds readers that death is universal and that tales of beings beyond natural life can help us cope and connect.
Subtitled “Unveiling 50 Phantoms that Have Haunted History,” each entry in this worldwide tour — from a ghost who haunted ancient Greece to the wandering figure of La Mocuana of Nicaragua — begins with a story leading the reader toward a monstrous encounter, followed by a definition, description and history, and ways we might have encountered it in pop, literary and cinematic culture.
Full-page, boldly colored illustrations by Mabel Esteban García of each being nearly vibrate, reaching for the reader through the page. Smaller illustrations scattered throughout -— an Icelandic draugr in the form of a black cat, the red heel of a monstrous Nigerian teacher named Madam Koi Koi — deepen the world-building.
By Reader Services librarians Genesee Rickel and Misha Stone.
This column was originally published in part in the Seattle Times as part of our monthly column, and is reprinted here with permission.