Today I am beginning a mini series featuring a few library professionals who love horror. Over the next 2 days, I am featuring 3 library folks. First up is my editor at Library Journal and the fearless [pun intended] leader of the Best Horror of 2020 team for the magazine, Stephanie Klose.
What I love about all three of the librarians I am featuring is that they share both why they love horror and give tips on how to help readers. Librarians never stop working to help readers even when looking at themselves as a reader.
Why I Love Horror by Stephanie Klose
My favorite flavor of horror has always been Something Creepy Is Happening in the Woods. Is there a mysterious house? Is there at least one secret passageway? Does an unsuspecting family move in? Is there, perhaps, a mysterious old woman or a haunted nobleman who’s shut himself away from society living nearby? Are there unsettling, unexplainable occurrences that eventually are linked to a tragedy no one wants to talk about? Did some sort of ritual, ideally connected to the area’s folklore, go wrong? I credit these extremely specific tastes to early exposure to the cult classic Disney film The Watcher in the Woods and William Sleator’s debut novel, Blackbriar.
In the former, a family moves to a manor house deep in the woods somewhere in England. The teenage daughter, Jan, starts seeing a blindfolded girl in broken mirrors, soon learning that she was the property’s owner’s (Bette Davis!) daughter, Karen, who mysteriously disappeared 30 years earlier when she and her friends were conducting a ceremony in a chapel located even deeper in the woods. Jan decides that recreating the ritual during an upcoming eclipse will bring Karen back from wherever she went, and gathers the people who were there that night. What the film lacks in internal logic, it makes up for in many, many increasingly creepy shots demonstrating that something is, in fact, watching Jan from the woods.
William Sleator would go on to write House of Stairs, among many other works of suspense and speculative fiction for teens, but his first book, Blackbriar, is the one that ticked all my boxes as a kid. Danny and his guardian, Phillippa, move from London to an isolated cottage, the titular Blackbriar, in the woods near a series of mounds called the tumuli. Danny finds a rough wooden doll in his bedroom that Phillippa is inexplicably terrified of, and he has dreams about robed chanting people in which he hears a woman’s laughter. Danny and his new friend Lark learn that the cottage was a pesthouse during the Black Plague, then find a secret passage from Blackbriar’s basement that leads to a room full of skeletons. The passage continues to Harleigh Manor, where the reclusive and cranky Lord Harleigh has a portrait of the witch who cared for the plague victims holding the very wooden doll Danny has in his pocket. Eventually Lark and Danny are able to use the doll to distract Lord Harleigh during a ritual at the tumuli in which he and a group of people believe they’ve called forth a demon into the body of Phillippa’s cat and intend to burn it alive.
The thing these two works have in common, and what they taught me to love about horror, is the assurance that there’s more to the world than meets the eye. Every mirror you go by could be a portal to another dimension. That pile of junk in the basement? It could be hiding the doorway to a secret passageway. Your new boyfriend’s mom? She seems perfectly pleasant, but she could be living with the decades-old guilt of taking part in a ritual that made a young woman disappear. Horror taught me to look closely, to question surface impressions, to pick up the rotting log and see what’s underneath. The unseen may or may not be terrifying, but it’s definitely all around us.
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