by Joseph Andre Thomas (@bunttriple) They’re (finally) here—the HOWL Society Best of 2022 Awards. Yes, the new year has come and gone long ago (along, apparently, with any semblance of my commitments and responsibilities). But at long last the hammer has struck the anvil, and the winners have been chosen.HOWLS members voted on their top… Continue reading The 2022 HOWLS Awards
by Christopher O’Halloran (@Burgleinfernal) Poll the average HOWLer and you'll get the same opinion: the world is a dumpster fire. Many find it hard to point at the marvels around us without being overwhelmed by the constant injustices going on every day. Whether that’s the mistreatment of minority populations by both authority figures and fellow… Continue reading Friday Black by Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah
by ghazal ghaffari (@ghazal) One of the most important books from Iran, and Hedayat’s magnum opus. This brilliant book is the literary manifestation of a fever dream. Hedayat leads us through the non-linear story of an unnamed narrator, plagued by death and murderous intentions. A wildly unconventional piece of literature, with subtle plays on the… Continue reading Boof-e Koor (The Blind Owl) by Sadegh Hedayat
by Molly Collins (@History Bot) We all know vampires. They hate garlic, they can’t cross moving water, the sun burns them, they’ve got to hang out in their coffins pretty regularly, they suck blood, and they live for a long, long time. This week over at HOWL Society, we read a book that sticks to… Continue reading The Gilda Stories by Jewelle L. Gómez
by Amanda Nevada DeMel (@shtuff4avacadoes) The Tribe is a unique horror novel. It’s not a gross-out horror and it doesn’t have a continuous stream of terrors. What differentiates it from other quiet horrors is the emphasis on the Jewish way of life. Taking place in the early 1980s, memories (and survivors) of the Holocaust are… Continue reading The Tribe by Bari Wood
by @SemaphoreRaven Inside every woman’s heart lives the dream of poisoning everyone they know, isolating themselves in a ruined house in the woods (plus or minus a few close friends and a cat), and becoming enshrined in local legend as the child-eating witch used to scare children from mischief. Okay, maybe that’s just me, but… Continue reading We Have Always Lived in the Castle by Shirley Jackson
by @Bodysnatcher Bunny Listen, Bunny, this book is doing a lot but like in a good way. It's Heathers for the MFA crowd, but so much more. There are these girls who are so perfect you could just throw up and die, and get this, they call each other Bunny, Bunny. Talk about enmeshed. They… Continue reading Bunny by Mona Awad
by @drthoss Have you ever looked into the mirror for too long? Not at a mirror, you understand. No. Into it. Into it so far that you, like Alice trembling before the rabbit hole, teeter on the edge of all that you know, and just as you want to look away, you see what you… Continue reading The Secret of Ventriloquism by Jon Padgett
by @SemaphoreRaven Picture, if you will, the stereotype of the ‘50s American Housewife. The perfect hair and makeup, the ever-present smile, the look of joy when presented with the newest in cooking and cleaning products. Her house is spotless. She always has dinner hot and ready for her husband when he gets home from work.… Continue reading The Stepford Wives by Ira Levin
by @Asenath Ah, incest. The Gothic’s favorite taboo, there from the very beginning. Much like the function of incest in the original Gothic novels, the horror in Pin is less focused on the perverse acts themselves than on the ways in which a young woman is forced to exchange one captor for another. Here, teenage… Continue reading Pin by Andrew Neiderman
