Books like The House on the Borderland

I love this book because it turns reading itself into a haunted space.

House of Leaves doesn’t just tell me something is wrong; it makes me physically experience disorientation on the page. I admire books that take big formal risks and still keep a human pulse underneath the invention.

This one made me feel trapped in a maze made of rooms, footnotes, fear, and obsession, and I mean that as high praise.

What one reads as a child often makes a powerful impact. While not exactly a haunted house novel, I first encountered this tale of a bedridden young girl who finds that she dreams of what she draws (with a magic pencil) through the legendarily creepy 1972 adaptation, Escape into Night, (of which only black and white videotapes remain) and afterward read it and thought it very atmospheric.

Every attempt by Marianne to ‘correct’ her defective artwork somehow makes the situation more nightmarish, and the house she initially draws is particularly disturbing in the way naïve drawings can be, as are the sinister, crude stone entities that gather around it, imprisoning the boy who she has drawn–and trapped–inside; and the landscape, literal and psychological, is eerily memorable.

This is a really atmospheric graphic novel–a form that can be brilliant at conveying creeping unease (see also Charles Burns). Dowdy Abbey lives with her newish dentist husband (she’s his second wife) and alienated daughter Crystal in his picturesque lakeside house. Living mostly inside her head, Abbey starts to believe there is a dark secret concerning her husband’s first wife, Sheila, who is dead. She starts to dream and then sees what appears to be the ghost of Sheila. Yet, is the increasingly alarming entity what it seems?

This graphic novel pulls off what the supernatural genre almost never manages to–genuinely keeping the reader guessing as to whether or not it’s all happening in Abbey’s head–while also delivering surprising and deft twists and turns all along the way. Loved it.

When Truman Capote reread this book to make a screenplay of it, he grumbled there was ‘barely a writeable scene’ because so much of the book concerns the unnamed governess’s increasingly frantic interpretations of phenomena that may only be hallucinations.

When I first read it, I found its protagonist excessively flighty; since then, it’s grown on me as perhaps the subtlest of ghost stories, its implicitly sexually predatory specters (who hope, it seems, to escape hell by perverting the two young innocents in the governess’s care), prefiguring the garish horrors of films like Hellraiser, in which demon cenobite Pinhead, summoned by the opening of a magical box, threatens depraved protagonist Frank: ‘Your suffering will be legendary, even in hell’–which fate seems apt for the malign Peter Quint and Miss Jessell.

I love this novel so much that I named my son Phineas in homage.

Anthony Trollope might seem the ur-English novelist because of his much-loved series of Barhhester novels set among clerics in a provincial town, but he spent much of his working life in Ireland and wrote passionately about the country in many of his books.

Phineas Finn is a kind of alter ego, a young Irishman equipped with charm, good looks, and very little money. He becomes a Member of Parliament and sets out to find his way through the challenges and dilemmas of high society in Victorian London. His moral compass sometimes goes slightly awry, but it generally comes right in the end.

Trollope’s psychological subtlety draws out the ambiguities and prejudices that Phineas encounters and reminds us of the central part played by Ireland in the British Empire. He died long before Ireland’s separation from Britain,… show more.

Revolutionary historians are familiar with the Townshend Acts, import duties approved by Parliament in 1767 that pushed the Americans closer toward independence. Patrick Griffin explores the man for who the taxes were named—Chancellor of the Exchequer Charles Townshend—but also his brother George who served as Lord Lieutenant of Ireland from 1767 to 1772. By comparing and contrasting these two brothers who ran the British Empire for a brief moment, Griffin invites us to consider the American Revolution within its imperial context. I found the parallels between America where independence efforts succeeded and Ireland where they failed particularly thought-provoking. 

This ground-breaking book was the first illustrated field guide to cover all of the more than 270 species of bees that occur in Great Britain and Ireland. It provides a detailed account of the natural history of these fascinating insects, plus photographs and taxonomic keys to help you to determine what they are. Be warned, however, as the author acknowledges, many bees are challenging to identify! Nonetheless, Falk and Lewington’s book is invaluable for anyone interested in the natural history of bees.

Still the best introductory text for students covering all major events in the Wars of the Three Kingdoms in a concise and accessible manner. This book steps away from the more Anglo-centric analyses of the conflict, looking at events in Ireland, Scotland and Wales in some detail. In contrast with the books above, Bennett also steps away from the experience of political elites and examines the experiences of ordinary soldiers and civilians during the conflict.  

This was the first wildlife reference book I ever owned, and I’ve never regretted buying it.

I still use it most days to identify birds on the bird feeder or bats flying over my house. It also includes great photos, which I personally prefer to drawings. This is a little gem that I have spent hours flicking through. 

To understand the history of Irish immigrants in America, you first need to study the country they left.

Breandán Mac Suibhne’s The End of Outrage examines traditions of rural violent protest in nineteenth-century Donegal, the county where many of the Molly Maguires of Pennsylvania originated. Intriguingly, MacSuibhne also uncovers a significant degree of reverse migration and cultural influence from Pennsylvania to Ireland.

His title contains a triple pun: the word “end” refers to the goal of Irish agrarian protest, the termination of that tradition by the famine and mass emigration, and the failure of subsequent generations to acknowledge what happened.