Fantasy & Horror Fiction for Adults and Children
Recommended Reading
Enchanted Night, by Steven Millhauser
It was the title and beautiful cover that drew me to this book on the display table. The cover image deserves the highest praise for both its accurate representation of the book’s content and its haunting, detailed loveliness. It’s the kind of painting you want to climb into, so that you can step silently along the blue-dark avenues and among the sleepy trees in the soft, cool fragrance of a summer night—a night in which so much is going on.
Millhauser is one of a scant handful of virtuoso word-painters; he conjures the wistful nostalgia, the other-world yearning of the season so deftly that it hurts. Yes, it’s an achingly beautiful book. And the magic of books is this: what in real life is an elusive sense of some pulse-fluttering joy ungraspable, something barely glimpsed or touched before it disappears again in a mundane light—is here preserved. We can revisit this Enchanted Night as often as we like—and I do, for several nights a year, usually in July, sipping this book like wine, closing my eyes after each brief chapter to bask in its spell.
But make this promise with me: open this book only at night. To visit it under the sun would be a disservice to all concerned, ourselves most of all. Read it only in the stillness of night, in the hottest season of the year. You will come back to it, as will I; perhaps we’ll smile and wave knowingly over a fence as we pass, each following a sidewalk toward some murmur of conversation, some lilting melody of pipes.
October Dreams: A Celebration of Halloween, edited by Richard Chizmar and Robert Morrish
This is
the definitive collection of Hallowe’en stories.
Dozens of authors, some well-known, some not yet, have spun wonderful,
creepy,
twisted, spooky, startling tales of All Hallows Eve. And what may even
be more
fun is that many have also recorded memories of that dark
holiday—recollections
of childhood experiences, frights, delights, losses of innocence,
comings of
age, regrets, epiphanies. . . . Wouldn’t you agree that Hallowe’en is
largely
(perhaps even mostly) about memory? Most of us are too long in the
tooth (nice
Hallowe’en expression, eh?) to go trick-or-treating; but the
recollections of
those nights when we did are what fuels the holiday for us year after
year. Not
what we did, but the wonder and possibility we felt; we remember it as
much better
than it was. This book is a bellows to fan the lurid flames of
nostalgic
reconstruction—to help us “remember.”
provides free
home pages for members.
