Here are 100 books that Spook fans have personally recommended if you like
Spook.
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I have loved Halloween since I ran through the suburban streets of southern Connecticut with ears and a tail. For more than thirty years I’ve been researching and writing about the holiday, and each year I find something new. Most of all, I’m a Halloween advocate: At Halloween we can wrap our arms around the reality of the other 364 days and satirize, exorcize, and celebrate it. The joy of Halloween is not that it’s dark and we revel in that; it’s that Halloween can bring a bit of light and laughter into the darkness. And, of course, it’s big, creative, candy-fueled fun.
Trick or Treat takes the history of Halloween and brings it into the 21st century. The book chronicles the holiday’s long history—distant and more recent, misconceptions and globalization—and offers up similar holiday stories as well, such as chapters on Dias de Los Muertos and All Saints Day celebrations. Looking for something to read or watch or listen to? Here you’ll find a chronicle of Halloween’s literature through 2012, as well as recent movies and music that capture the holiday’s culture in our world today.
Trick or Treat is the first book to both examine the origins and history of Halloween and explore in depth its current global popularity. Festivals like the Celtic Samhain and Catholic All Souls' Day have blended to produce the modern Halloween, which has been reborn in America - but there are also related but independent holidays, especially Mexico's Day of the Dead. Lisa Morton explores the explosion in popularity of haunted attractions and the impact of events such as the global economic recession, as well as the effect Halloween has had on popular culture through literary works, films and television…
Diary of a Citizen Scientist
by
Sharman Apt Russell,
Citizen Scientist begins with this extraordinary statement by the Keeper of Entomology at the London Museum of Natural History, “Study any obscure insect for a week and you will then know more than anyone else on the planet.”
As the author chases the obscure Western red-bellied tiger beetle across New…
I have loved Halloween since I ran through the suburban streets of southern Connecticut with ears and a tail. For more than thirty years I’ve been researching and writing about the holiday, and each year I find something new. Most of all, I’m a Halloween advocate: At Halloween we can wrap our arms around the reality of the other 364 days and satirize, exorcize, and celebrate it. The joy of Halloween is not that it’s dark and we revel in that; it’s that Halloween can bring a bit of light and laughter into the darkness. And, of course, it’s big, creative, candy-fueled fun.
This is my go-to book whenever I start a new Halloween writing project. It grounds me in details about the origins of Halloween (and holidays throughout the year) and illustrates brilliantly why the turning of the seasons has always been critical, and how holidays mark important cultural moments in so many ways. The origin of Halloween is here, but so is the origin of celebration itself.
Comprehensive and engaging, this colourful study covers the whole sweep of ritual history from the earliest written records to the present day. From May Day revels and Midsummer fires, to Harvest Home and Hallowe'en, to the twelve days of Christmas, Ronald Hutton takes us on a fascinating journey through the ritual year in Britain. He challenges many common assumptions about the customs of the past, and debunks many myths surrounding festivals of the present, to illuminate the history of the calendar year we live by today.
I have loved Halloween since I ran through the suburban streets of southern Connecticut with ears and a tail. For more than thirty years I’ve been researching and writing about the holiday, and each year I find something new. Most of all, I’m a Halloween advocate: At Halloween we can wrap our arms around the reality of the other 364 days and satirize, exorcize, and celebrate it. The joy of Halloween is not that it’s dark and we revel in that; it’s that Halloween can bring a bit of light and laughter into the darkness. And, of course, it’s big, creative, candy-fueled fun.
Not only is this a complete history of pumpkins – it’s a fascinating history of America. There’s good, solid jack-o-lantern history alongside descriptions and photos of the gazillion ways we celebrate, decorate, grow, eat, idolize, and display pumpkins. Emerging as a symbol of lust in medieval Europe, the pumpkin became synonymous with the American wilderness, then came to stand for rustic life, and now Halloween. If you like history and Americana as well as Halloween, you’ll like this one. And if you’re a Halloween nerd like I am, you’ll love the 100 pages of footnotes.
Why do so many Americans drive for miles each autumn to buy a vegetable that they are unlikely to eat? While most people around the world eat pumpkin throughout the year, North Americans reserve it for holiday pies and other desserts that celebrate the harvest season and the rural past. They decorate their houses with pumpkins every autumn and welcome Halloween trick-or-treaters with elaborately carved jack-o'-lanterns. Towns hold annual pumpkin festivals featuring giant pumpkins and carving contests, even though few have any historic ties to the crop.
In this fascinating cultural and natural history, Cindy Ott tells the story of…
From the New York Times bestselling author of The Last Castle and The Girls of Atomic City comes a new way to look at American history: through the lens of giving thanks.
Author Denise Kiernan tells the fascinating story of Sarah Josepha Hale, a widowed mother of five who campaigned…
I have loved Halloween since I ran through the suburban streets of southern Connecticut with ears and a tail. For more than thirty years I’ve been researching and writing about the holiday, and each year I find something new. Most of all, I’m a Halloween advocate: At Halloween we can wrap our arms around the reality of the other 364 days and satirize, exorcize, and celebrate it. The joy of Halloween is not that it’s dark and we revel in that; it’s that Halloween can bring a bit of light and laughter into the darkness. And, of course, it’s big, creative, candy-fueled fun.
Haunted Air is a book of undated photos of adults and children in costume. Not all of them may be Halloween photographs (we dressed up on so many occasions back then!), but most of them are. I love the handmade costumes and makeup, the creepy masks, the way the costumes tie into popular culture and the sheer joy of imagination they exude. It’s a creepy book, in a good way. David Lynch wrote the forward.
The roots of Hallowe'en lie in the ancient pre-Christian Celtic festival of Samhain, a feast to mark the death of the old year and the birth of the new. It was believed that on this night the veil separating the worlds of the living and the dead grew thin and ruptured, allowing spirits to pass through and walk unseen but not unheard amongst men. The advent of Christianity saw the pagan festival subsumed in All Souls' Day, when across Europe the dead were mourned and venerated. Children and the poor, often masked or in outlandish costume, wandered the night begging…
I’ve always been nostalgic. I long for a connection with times and places I’ve never experienced, and I think my fascination with ghosts and the uncanny is connected to that. As a child, I fell in love with ancient Egypt, with its famously complex religious traditions concerning death and the afterlife. I earned a PhD in Egyptology and spent a lifetime crafting stories about the past, often with a speculative or supernatural twist. For me, ghosts and history are a natural combination.
I read this book not long after reading Spook, and it scratched many of the same philosophical itches for me. I love its dreamlike quality and haunting sense of nostalgia. As far as I know, it's also unlike any other work of fiction in its approach to the question of life after death.
It blends two seemingly unrelated topics—historical disasters (e.g., the Hartford circus fire, the sinking of the Titanic)—and the science of near-death experiences in a striking, unique way. Although it is, in many ways, a deeply sad story, it ultimately feels hopeful. This is one of those novels that left a lasting impact on my psyche.
One of those rare, unforgettable novels that are as chilling as they are insightful, as thought-provoking as they are terrifying, award-winning author Connie Willis's Passage is an astonishing blend of relentless suspense and cutting-edge science unlike anything you've ever read before.
It is the electrifying story of a psychologist who has devoted her life to tracking death. But when she volunteers for a research project that simulates the near-death experience, she will either solve life's greatest mystery -- or fall victim to its greatest terror.
At Mercy General Hospital, Dr. Joanna Lander will soon be paged -- not to save…
I’ve always been nostalgic. I long for a connection with times and places I’ve never experienced, and I think my fascination with ghosts and the uncanny is connected to that. As a child, I fell in love with ancient Egypt, with its famously complex religious traditions concerning death and the afterlife. I earned a PhD in Egyptology and spent a lifetime crafting stories about the past, often with a speculative or supernatural twist. For me, ghosts and history are a natural combination.
I’ve been enamored with the history of spiritualism and supernatural flimflam for years, but this book was the first account I read by an insider. Keene’s explanations of how phony mediums operate are fascinating, as are his incisive musings on the nature of belief.
But I found Keene himself the most intriguing aspect of the book. I got the impression of a bright, insightful, and deeply conflicted man—in some ways, as much of an elusive trickster as ever. His descriptions of his antics as a spiritualist charlatan are bombastic and glib, but there’s an underlying poignancy.
I was left with a clearer picture of how the spiritualist con game worked but more questions than answers about Keene and his motives for leaving it behind.
M. Lamar Keene, who came to be known as the "Prince of the Spiritualists," enjoyed the riches and fame that accompany the life of a sought-after medium. He claimed to be clairvoyant and to produce objects out of thin air. He conducted seances in which participants talked with and even touched the dead. Yet every miracle Keene performed was a fraud, a lie, and a trick played on willing, gullible victims. In this powerful and brutally honest book, Keene exposes the secrets of the seance room, including ghostly apparitions, floating trumpets, "spirit sex," and other tricks used by mediums to…
I’ve always been nostalgic. I long for a connection with times and places I’ve never experienced, and I think my fascination with ghosts and the uncanny is connected to that. As a child, I fell in love with ancient Egypt, with its famously complex religious traditions concerning death and the afterlife. I earned a PhD in Egyptology and spent a lifetime crafting stories about the past, often with a speculative or supernatural twist. For me, ghosts and history are a natural combination.
This book profoundly appeals to the history nerd in me. It places the American Spiritualist movement in its historical and cultural context, examining everything from the connection between spiritualism and 19th-century technological innovations to the role of gender and sexuality in the séance room.
While it’s easy to dismiss spiritualism as a fringe oddity, McGarry’s book illuminates just how vital it was in shaping American culture and politics as we know them today. The academic language is a little dense in places, but that did not detract from my enjoyment of the meticulous scholarship and the enthralling subject matter.
"Ghosts of Futures Past" guides readers through the uncanny world of nineteenth-century American spiritualism. More than an occult parlor game, this was a new religion, which channeled the voices of the dead, linked present with past, and conjured new worldly and otherworldly futures. Tracing the persistence of magic in an emergent culture of secularism, Molly McGarry brings a once marginalized practice to the center of American cultural history. Spiritualism provided an alchemical combination of science and magic that called into question the very categories of male and female, material and immaterial, self and other, living and dead. Dissolving the boundaries…
I’ve always been nostalgic. I long for a connection with times and places I’ve never experienced, and I think my fascination with ghosts and the uncanny is connected to that. As a child, I fell in love with ancient Egypt, with its famously complex religious traditions concerning death and the afterlife. I earned a PhD in Egyptology and spent a lifetime crafting stories about the past, often with a speculative or supernatural twist. For me, ghosts and history are a natural combination.
I love weird and inexplicable things, and Gef's story is undoubtedly the weirdest tale of a real-life (ostensibly) paranormal phenomenon I have ever encountered.
The more you know about it, the weirder it gets, and Christopher Josiffe’s meticulously researched account really delivers. Gef’s story isn’t exactly about ghosts, per se—it’s not clear where the Extra Special Talking Mongoose came from or what he was supposed to be—but it fits nicely with my interest in the uncanny.
In true Fortean fashion, Josiffe lays out all the evidence for what happened with minimal attempts at interpretation, leaving the reader to puzzle it all out. And the final chapters, which cover similar “hauntings” and potentially relevant folklore, are worth the price of admission alone.
An exhaustive investigation of the case of Gef, a “talking mongoose” or “man-weasel,” who appeared to a family living on the Isle of Man.
“I am the fifth dimension! I am the eighth wonder of the world!”
During the mid-1930s, British and overseas newspapers were full of incredible stories about Gef, a “talking mongoose” or “man-weasel” who had allegedly appeared in the home of the Irvings, a farming family in a remote district of the Isle of Man. The creature was said to speak in several languages, to sing, to steal objects from nearby farms, and to eavesdrop on local…
I love stories about “pilgrimage.” I have always been an admirer of those characters who search, whether in fiction or nonfiction. I respect their steadfast endurance to undertake a calling, meet unforeseen obstacles, and overcome insurmountable circumstances, while never allowing the burning flame that drives them to extinguish.
My own memoir, Drummer Girl, is the story of my pilgrimage. I have the distinct memory of traveling through a dark tunnel toward a clear light during surgery as a child. This experience of near death has since driven me to seek understanding, to look for words when there were none, and to find solace through life’s many turns.
Always curious about those who experience near-death, I recently read In My Time of Dying.
Besides my self-interest in Junger’s actual experience, I found his curiosity and relentless determination to understand his experience, his idea of an afterlife, a pilgrimage into the metaphysical unknown. Mastering the medical knowledge of his vascular failure, Junger remains at a loss to intellectually grasp a cognitive understanding of his near-death experience.
At one point, an attending nurse said, “Instead of thinking of it as something scary, try thinking of it as something sacred.” It is Junger’s honest inquiry into the sacred and his weaving of questions with no clear answers that make this autobiography a humbling and insightful read.
A near-fatal health emergency leads to this powerful reflection on death—and what might follow—by the bestselling author of Tribe and The Perfect Storm.
For years as an award-winning war reporter, Sebastian Junger traveled to many front lines and frequently put his life at risk. And yet the closest he ever came to death was the summer of 2020 while spending a quiet afternoon at the New England home he shared with his wife and two young children. Crippled by abdominal pain, Junger was rushed to the hospital by ambulance. Once there, he began slipping away. As blackness encroached, he was…
I have been pursuing nuclear and particle physics as a career for nearly half a century, mostly in Western countries and Japan. As a professor of physics and engineering physics, I always strive to bring conceptual clarity to what I teach for application-oriented and abstract physics, even when I cannot bring the same level of connection to physical reality in my research. I am deeply concerned that physicists have gone astray in their mathematical quest to develop a glamorous picture of the building blocks of matter and the basic interactions among them. This book is an outgrowth of my search to understand the limits of human knowledge to unravel nature’s mysteries.
Science meets Religion and Art is an apt summary of this delightful work of Mendillo, an astronomy professor. In a couple of hundred pages, the author shares his knowledge accumulated over a few decades of his studies by analyzing the centuries of work by astronomers, artists, and theologians. This book would be of interest to practicing astronomers as well as casual stargazers.
Having lived on three continents, I am always fascinated by the way religion and the art that goes with it have influenced societies’ thinking and narratives of stellar objects and cosmology. This influence is reflected in the art and images artists create to express their faith. Professor Mendillo has summarized his decades-long exploration of these connections as found in cathedrals, museums, etc., in this book.
In this book, Boston University Professor of Astronomy Michael Mendillo takes readers deep into the annals of history, showing how visual depictions of the heavens evolved in tandem with science and religion throughout much of Western culture.
With unprecedented scope and scale, Professor Mendillo explores how cave art, illuminated manuscripts, sculptures, paintings and architecture reflected some of the great religious and secular battles taking place over the course of centuries. Enter a world of biblical proportions, where constellations of ancient heroes and pagans were thoroughly recast as Christian saints and the Twelve Apostles.
This nontechnical narrative brings vitality and accessibility…
