#AScareADay 2024 Reading Challenge Reflections

If you saw my Preview of #AScareADay Reading Challenge 2024 post last month, you’ll know I spent my October reading 31 scary stories and poems curated by Dr. Sam Hirst of Romancing the Gothic. This was my third year participating in this spooky season reading challenge, and I loved it more than ever! Every year, I discover new-to-me authors, both contemporary and from centuries past, that I’m excited to explore further. These challenges are also a great reminder of how much I love short stories and poetry—forms I don’t devote quite as much attention to as novels. Plus, this year we explored a format I’ve never really read before: short webcomics. You can find the stories for this year’s reading challenge here, and check out the #AScareADay hashtag on Twitter and Bluesky to see the great discussions we’ve been having all month. Read on to see what I thought of the specific stories from this year’s challenge and stick around to the end of this post to hear about my recent guest appearance on a podcast!

Illustration by Greg Ruth for Lavie Tidhar’s “Selfies,” published on Tor.com (now Reactor magazine) in 2014.

I was proud of how well I kept up with the challenge this year. Even though October is my busy season, I only fell behind a couple of times and was able to quickly catch back up. It helped that Sam kept the reading list really well balanced between short stories and poetry, especially at the beginning of the month. A particularly long piece was always followed by something short and sweet the next day. The texts in the challenge are also arranged in a roughly chronological order, so we started the month in the eighteenth century with Matthew Lewis and Goethe and ended with authors that are living and writing today like Carmen Maria Machado and Lavie Tidhar. As I mentioned in my preview post, I’d only read a couple of the stories before, so almost everything in this year’s challenge was new to me!

American Mystery Classics edition of Miss Pinkerton by Mary Roberts Rinehart, featuring Nurse Adams, the sleuth from “Locked Doors.”

Starting with some of the tales I mentioned being excited for in my preview post: “The Overcoat” by Nikolai Gogol gave me all the weird, bleak Russian vibes I expected. “Dracula’s Guest” by  Bram Stoker was actually not among my favorites; I came to the conclusion that this “deleted first chapter” was deleted for good reason. But I did love “Locked Doors” by Mary Roberts Rinehart, which turned out to feature a recurring series character from Rinehart’s novels. Nurse Adams, or “Miss Pinkerton” as she is sometimes known, is a tough and clever nurse who moonlights with the local police, using her profession to slip into delicate situations the officers cannot access. In this short story, she insinuates herself among a paranoid young family that seem to be haunted by a ghost—or something else—that prowls through their home at night. Now I’m excited to check out two of her novels, Miss Pinkerton and The Haunted Lady, that we publish at my day job.

Quite a few of the new favorites I discovered were works of poetry, including “Porphyria’s Lover” by Robert Browning. I’m much more familiar with Browning’s wife, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, who is famous for her sonnet “How Do I Love Thee?” Robert’s poem takes a much darker look at romantic love. In just a few dozen lines, he depicts what at first seems like a cozy meeting between lovers while a storm rages outside, before taking a sharp left turn into horror as the narrator’s jealous passion drives him to do the unthinkable. Sylvia Plath’s “The Snowman on the Moor” also explores the dark side of relationships, this time from the perspective of a wronged woman who rushes out into the snow in a fit of anger after an argument. But the terrifying vision she encounters on the moor reminds her that clever, strong-willed women who contradict or undermine the powerful men in their lives generally do not meet a happy fate. On the flip side, Robert Service’s poem “The Cremation of Sam McGee” has a surprisingly glib and humorous tone, considering its subject matter: a man burdened with the task of cremating his companion on an Arctic gold-prospecting expedition. 

Among the prose stories, my favorites include “In a Closed Room,” a short story by Frances Hodgson Burnett, who I’d previously only known as the author of The Secret Garden. This tale involves a more sinister garden, In a “Bluebeard”-like setup, an impoverished family is invited to make themselves at home as caretakers in an abandoned mansion—apart from one locked room on an upper floor. However, as their young daughter will eventually discover, death always lurks behind locked doors… The creepiest part of this story is how happy and carefree the young protagonist is, while the reader grows more and more unsettled. I also loved “Carnivorine” by Lucy Hooper, a fun tale of a mad scientist and his carnivorous plant that feels like if Little Shop of Horrors was written in the Victorian era. On the more modern side, I loved “Drowning Songs” by M. S. Dean, an emotionally moving tale that felt a bit like the Biblical story of Abraham and Isaac blended with Ursula K. LeGuin’s “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas.”

Even if you didn’t participate in the challenge, you can still peruse Sam’s reading list the next time you’re in search of a good short story or poem. And while you’re at it, check out the reading lists for 2023 and 2022, as well!

Lastly, I was recently invited on a podcast to chat about Gothic literature! Vanessa Rogers of the Fabric of Folklore podcast read my piece on Folk Horror and was excited to chat about the overlap of folklore and Gothic/horror literature. We discussed everything from Gothic literature’s origins to the creatures from folklore that often grace its pages. You can check out our discussion on YouTube or find “Episode 64: Gothic Roots” of the Fabric of Folklore podcast on your favorite podcast-listening app. Comment below if you have any thoughts on either the #AScareADay reading challenge or the podcast episode!