100 Books Like Ghosts of My Life

I am a movie, book, and culture fanatic, but the ultimate medium for me is music.

Hauntology and folk horror are both greatly informed by music and have subsequently resulted in music that is informed by the concepts of hauntology and folk horror. I focus a lot on this reciprocal relationship in my book, but no one has explored the connections between the music of the past and the music of the future in greater detail than Rob Young in Electric Eden.

Starting with the revival of folk music in England, this book ranges through psychedelic and acid folk, touching on rock, prog, classical, experimental, and electronic music in a dizzying but exhilarating tour of the weirdos, outcasts, and visionaries that ushered in a new age of music with one foot in rural heritage and the other in futuristic utopian dreams.

From The Incredible String Band to Current 93… show more.

The Scarred for Life series (Volumes 1-3) is the most in-depth and expansive overviews of hauntological culture yet to be printed.

Covering Britain's popular (and unpopular) culture from 1970-1989, Scarred for Life leaves no stone unturned in its quest to discuss all the strangest TV, film, music, fiction, and other cultural ephemera that made these years the central influences on the “haunted generation.”

My favorite is Volume One, which covers the 1970s, when it seemed that the mission of the British media was to scare children into total passive submission. Although not exactly my childhood experience, I still loved every terrifying description and the authors’ “traumatic” memories.

Hopefully, some brave soul will write the American equivalent.

While there is a great biography of writer Nigel Kneale (Andy Murray’s Into The Unknown: The Fantastic Life of Nigel Kneale), I chose Andrew Screen’s comprehensive The Book of Beasts to represent Kneale’s essential contributions to hauntology and folk horror.

Beasts was a folk horror anthology television series broadcast in 1976, and Screen’s book covers all six episodes from idea to finished product in the most minute detail. I certainly enjoyed the production minutia, but what I feel puts this book in rarefied air is Screen’s unprecedented access to Kneale’s archives, uncovering unseen drafts of scripts as well as rejected ideas for other episodes. Screen also traces the folkloric/paranormal inspirations behind the show.

I wish all books on television would be as thorough and eye opening as The Book of Beasts.

People often ask me why folk horror has returned with such a vengeance in the 21st century.

I tried to address this resurgence in my book, but one of the strongest foundations for making such conjectures appears in Howard David Ingham’s extensive, wide ranging survey of the folk horror film genre We Don’t Go Back: A Watcher's Guide to Folk Horror and Pagan Film. 

Both informative and critically engaging, this book is my favorite book on the subject in a field that has vastly expanded over the last five years. Ingham’s vision encompasses not only the canonical British folk horror entries but casts a wide net, pulling in fascinating examples from across the world.

I love books that educate me, but I especially appreciate books that give me new works to hunt down. We Don’t Go Back had me writing lists and jumping on the internet searching for new treasures… show more.

This is the most obvious book on this list. If you do read one book about climate change, make it this one.

It’s mainly not about climate change at all, but about the difficult balance between protecting people and freedom of expression. If we want a society that makes life better for all, and I do want that, we need to get this balance right.

It’s hard, as Nelson shows, but also incredibly exciting to identify freedom, in art, in sex, in drugs and in climate. This list isn’t an accident. 

This is a fun book. The late Bob Adey’s passion for locked-room puzzles and his extraordinary breadth of reading shines through. After a discursive history of this type of detective story, he lists over two thousand novels and stories and the ‘impossible crime’ elements within them. A separate section listing all the solutions is not only enlightening but highly entertaining. A recent updated edition by Brian Skupin evidences the enduring appeal of ‘miraculous mysteries.’ 

Perez is a commanding figure in this scholarship, deeply learned. I like teaching this concise book of his, full of powerful illustrations (cartoons over many decades), because it really gets at how North Americans have projected their racialized and sexualized fantasies and obsessions onto this island, unable to perceive Cubans as real people, let alone historical actors.

In 2018, I visited one of the most unusual exhibitions I’d ever been to. Hosted by the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, ‘Spellbound’ examined how magical thinking has been practiced over the centuries.

From mummified cats to lovers’ rings, the displays were dazzling. Every time I open the accompanying book, with its remarkable photographs and illustrations, I’m transported back to this extraordinary, baffling world.

I find WASP culture absurd and fascinating. I love that rich people, really rich people, have a fixation with stickers, slapping abbreviations for Martha’s Vineyard or Nantucket or East Hampton on their luxury vehicles even though said luxury vehicles, parked in said locales, really should say it all. Such is the taxonomy writ large in Lisa Birnbach’s seminal Preppy Handbook, which explores other WASP signifiers such as “the politics of monogramming,” the elevation of old clothes over new, and what your choice of private schools, charities and vacation spots says about you. Pairs well with Take Ivy, a cult photography book by the Japanese photographer T. Hayashida, who spent the early-to-mid 1960s photographing American preps on college campuses — with prep soon becoming the rage in the Japan’s hipster Ginza district.

Paul Levitz was a writer, editor, editor in chief, publisher, and president of DC Comics for decades. This oversized coffee table book is a treasure trove of his insights, memories, and analysis. It’s the definitive history of DC, which only he could write. And it’s full of fun colorful images, making it interesting to younger readers as well as a perfect gift to any pop culture or comics lover.