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.’ 

This is an accessible account of history through the lens of how “mistakes were made,” and how most of us aren’t told about them.

It is plain old-fashioned great fun to read about blunders in the worlds of business, sports, pop culture, even some of America’s epic military failures (so long as they happened long ago!). A great corrective to claims that the US is uniquely blessed with perfection.

My introduction to world mythology was Joseph Campbell, who described a nearly universal narrative – or monomyth – in which a young man (such as Christ, Percival, or the Buddha) ventures from his land, defeats opponents or temptations and returns with a critical gift for his people.

America, however, inverted this myth in profoundly important ways. In our story, repeated over three centuries in thousands of sermons, novels, movies, television, and video games, an innocent and racially pure community is threatened by evil (usually non-white).

When democratic institutions fail to suppress the threat, a selfless superhero arrives – from elsewhere – to defeat the villains and restore the community to harmony. Then, however, disdaining the feminine values of community and relationship, this hero disappears (often into the West).

I realized that he is the model for both our ideas of distant fathering as well as our unshakable belief in American… show more.

1980s Berlin is famous for two things: a wild counterculture and the sudden demise of the Wall. In recalling the outsize personalities he got to know on both sides of the Wall, Paul Hockenos brings the two strands of history as close together as can be done. The music and party scene, the communes and the squats, arose during this quiet lull in the Cold War, as political, musical, and sexual misfits found their niche in the dead zones along the Wall. Most of us living in Berlin in the 80s enjoyed the peace and quiet. This book shows what most of us were missing out on.

As cliché as it sounds, I truly did laugh and cry my way through this excellent book of essays by actress and comedian Casey Wilson. Wilson is an excellent storyteller and someone who is just profoundly, naturally funny. But she does not shy away from some heartbreaking and emotionally raw material too, which, quite frankly, is my jam. I did that thing where you get both the book and the audiobook, so when you are walking the dog you can still be reading. I highly recommend following suit because Wilson is such a  delight to listen to. I may have had to pull my car over while listening one day because it was not safe to drive whilst weeping uncontrollably.