Books like The Stepdaughter

"The disco is red, with murder and blood..."

Battling their addiction to disco music, a gang of juvenile delinquents hitch a ride across an imaginary America. 'Discomania' reads like Kerouac's 'On The Road', if it had been written by The Shangri Las (which, obviously, would only have made it better). One of the prestige texts of outsider art, the author's enthusiasm for her story is evident from the first page, sometimes almost carrying her away. But this excitement at the opportunity to write, the evident compulsion to get it all down on paper whilst you still have the chance, is what gives the narrative the drive lacking in other books where the privilege to write is a given.

'Discomania' is also ahead of its time for what reads like a 'Young Adult' novel. There is a frankness towards and acceptance of queer sexuality, plus the plot does not… show more.

Marina Chapman, now a resident of Bradford (UK), claims that, as a child in 1950's Colombia, she was abandoned by her family and raised by Capuchin monkeys in the Amazon rainforest. The plot has so many similarities to those mythic tales of feral children that a lot of readers have questioned whether this supposed autobiography can really be true. Personally, I don't really care. Never let the truth stand in the way of the great story and this is a great story, from the scary but mystical epiphanies in the jungle to the even more savage experiences of sex work and slavery when Marina is returned to civilisation. If some of the events are exaggerated or romanticised, isn't that the case with all autobiographies? I mean other people (not me) loved 'The Salt Path' and that was surely a much more insidious hoax?

Most importantly, although I had actually… show more.

I first loved Rebecca for its atmosphere, but what stayed with me was something more unsettling: how completely another person’s version of the past can shape the present.

I remember finishing it and thinking about how easily we accept a story when everyone around us seems to believe it. As a writer, I keep returning to that idea.

Du Maurier showed me that an absence can dominate a novel as powerfully as a living character, and that what people refuse to say can matter as much as what they reveal. That has stayed with me in my own writing about memory, silence, and family secrets.

I love this book because it proves fear does not have to shout to own the room.

Shirley Jackson makes dread feel elegant, patient, and almost polite, which somehow makes it worse. I admire how much she trusts atmosphere, silence, suggestion, and character discomfort.

That is the kind of horror I respect most: not just “what is happening?” but “why does everything suddenly feel wrong?”

I read all of Blackwood’s novels and stories when researching my first biography, on the life of Caroline Blackwood. This is the one that stayed with me, Blackwood’s semi-autobiographical novella of Dunmartin Manor, housing three generations of Websters and Dunmartins. From the cold cruelty of the narrator’s great grandmother, to the fairy-like madness of her grandmother, and the tragedy of her fun-loving but suicidal Aunt Lavinia, all seem like extensions of the mansion—a decaying, grand old house, freezing in the winter, sweltering in the summer, and given to flooding. Like the house itself, the characters are trapped by the weight of their own Anglo-Irish, aristocratic history. No conflagration here, except for the cremation of Great Granny Webster.

Another unnamed narrator visits Roderick Usher, an old friend, in yet another decaying mansion that houses an isolated, disturbed family—Roderick and his twin sister, Madeline. They are the last of the Ushers, but she has fallen into a cataleptic state—one of Poe’s treasured themes! The manse itself is surrounded by a lake, and a crack runs the length of the house. Roderick tells his friend that the house is alive and entwined with his and Madeline’s fate. Madeline dies and is entombed in the family vault, but Roderick fears that she’s not really dead. During a cataclysmic storm, Madeline has indeed clawed her way out of her tomb and she attacks her brother. The narrator flees into the night, looking back to see the house split in two and crumble into fragments, becoming the final tomb for Roderick and his sister. Dark!  

Whenever people think of Shirley Jackson, The Haunting of Hill House springs to mind, and, for many years, I stopped right there. I was wrong.

In my opinion, We Have Always Lived in the Castle is actually a much better book – better in terms of plot and characterization. In telling the story of the decidedly disturbed and disturbing Blackwood family and their sinister home, Shirley Jackson explores small-town prejudice as well as the creeping impression that, while something awful has already happened, there is much worse to follow.

Merricat is a character I identified with. She is strong, determined, and a fighter. With the odds stacked so firmly against her, she needs to be. Jackson’s last novel is, for me at least, her greatest.