Seasonal Syllabi #1: Hauntology
a haunted (& hauntological) reading list for October
Twice already Marie had pointed out the brilliance of the autumnal sun on the perfect field of corn, because the brilliance of the autumnal sun on the perfect field of corn put her in mind of a haunted house—not a haunted house she had ever actually seen but the mythical one that sometimes appeared in her mind (with adjacent graveyard and cat on a fence) whenever she saw the brilliance of the autumnal sun on the perfect etc. etc., and she wanted to make sure that, if the kids had a corresponding mythical haunted house that appeared in their minds whenever they saw the brilliance of the etc. etc., it would come up now, so that they could all experience it together, like friends, like college friends on a road trip, sans pot, ha ha ha!
—George Saunders, “Puppy”
Dear Friends,
I have about a half dozen other newsletter drafts in the works, and all of them feel like they require more time and mental energy than I can give them. So, in the spirit (heh) of feeling drained and lifeless, I come to you with offerings of October-appropriate books. I love horror, and I love the Gothic, and I love hauntings. My favorite subgenre hiding in the shadows below the belfry is the haunted house story though.
The house is a site of power. It represents not only the current—but also the past lives of everyone who ever lived there. In the Gothic, it holds their trauma. It also holds the trauma of the land and its blood-soaked history. In the Southern Gothic, for example, this takes on the form of plantations and the legacy of chattel slavery. There is no finer novel that deals with literal and metaphorical ghosts than Beloved by Toni Morrison. This is one way we’ve come to defined magical realism: mismatches in power dynamics due to colonialism and imperialism.
Overall, what fascinates me about the haunted house is it becomes a type of sponge for agony. The house itself becomes a living entity—often decaying or labyrinthine—mirroring the psyche of its inhabitants (living or dead) or visitors. The supernatural occurrences in the house are frequently tied to historical events or sins that refuse to be forgotten, trapping the present in a cycle of haunting.
Beyond power, the house becomes a means to talk about mental illness (‘madness’), complex post-traumatic stress disorder, and other disturbances of the mind and the body’s emotions. This isn’t purely Western either: whether the curse of Kayako Saeki in The Grudge franchise or what Bol and Rial go through as South Sudanese refugees in His House (2020), the specters and the spaces they haunt comes out of one of our oldest oral literatures.
What follows is a list of some personal favorites, including some deeper cuts. I know you know about “The Fall of the House of Usher” and The Shining and The Haunting of Hill House, so consider this an opportunity for potential new hauntings.
Hauntings in Literature (Stories, Novellas, and Novels)
1946 — Julio Cortázar — “Casa Tomada” (translated as “House Taken Over” by Paul Blackburn)
1971 — Richard Matheson — Hell House
1978 — Anne Rivers Siddons — The House Next Door
1981 — Michael McDowell — The Elementals
1988 — Mariko Koike — The Graveyard Apartment
2009 — Helen Oyeyemi — White is for Witching
2014 — Lauren Oliver — Rooms
2015 — Paul Tremblay — A Head Full of Ghosts
2016 — Mariana Enriquez — “Adela’s House”
2017 — Jac Jemc — The Grip of It
2017 — Laura Purcell — The Silent Companions
2020 — emily m. danforth — Plain Bad Heroines
2020 — Zoje Stage — Wonderland
2021 — Kyle Lukoff — Too Bright to See
2023 — Ai Jiang — “Linghun”
2023 — T. Kingfisher — A House with Good Bones
2024 — Josh Malerman — Incidents Around the House
2024 — Rivers Solomon — Model Home
Are there any I neglected? (It would be in the spirit of the haunted house to neglect.) Any haunted house books you love? Feel free to comment and recommend some more!
Hauntings in Criticism and Nonfiction
One of my favorite words is “hauntology “ (a portmanteau of haunt and ontology). Coined by Derrida, it describes how past ideas, ideologies, and cultural forms "haunt" the present, preventing the development of something truly new. Derrida introduces the term in response to Francis Fukuyama’s claim that liberal capitalism had won after the Cold War, signaling the "end of history."
Wait! Capitalism? I thought you were talking about ghosts, and now you are talking about classism again. You sure are wily, JD Scott.
Yes, I am, but hear me out…
While “hauntology” generally refers to repressed aspects of history (i.e.: failed utopian dreams), there is something of literary value in the way that the past persists because its ghosts were never fully reconciled—or because the hopeful future they promised was never realized. This is why, in hauntological theory, there's a focus on the lost futures—the futures that could have been but were never realized.
This nostalgia often appears in cultural forms (i.e.: the arts) that recycle past aesthetics, signaling an inability to imagine a truly new future. This has its ties to Marxism in the sense that the utopian aspirations for a post-capitalist future continue to linger, even as those hopes seem increasingly remote.
From a Marxist perspective, hauntology suggests that contemporary capitalism is haunted by the alternatives it has suppressed, particularly socialism and/or communism. The market-driven, consumerist culture constantly repeats and reuses the past (vintage styles, retro music, rebooted films) rather than producing genuinely innovative cultural products. This is because the forces of late capitalism thrive on constant recycling, reinforcing its own dominance by keeping radical alternatives like Marxism in the realm of the "unthinkable."
By the way, this all comes about because Derrida was playing with the concept of the "specter," referring to Marx’s famous opening of The Communist Manifesto ("A specter is haunting Europe—the specter of communism"). Derrida argues that Marxism, even if no longer politically dominant, continues to “haunt” the world because its critiques of capitalism remain valid, and the need for justice and equality persists in the face of capitalist exploitation.
My book recommendation for this is A Specter is Haunting Europe: A Sociohistorical Approach to the Fantastic by José B. Monleón. Although Monleón’s specialty is Spanish literature, he offers up a more literary definition of hauntology that spins the fantastic and the Gothic as a manifestation of literal monsters.
If you’re looking for more general nonfiction with a little more narrative and a little less theory, I’d also recommend Ghostland: An American History in Haunted Places by Colin Dickey.
I think of ghosts and haunting as just being alert. If you're really alert, then you see the life that exists beyond the life that is on top. It's not spooky necessarily—might be—but it doesn't have to be. It's something I relish rather than run from.
Toni Morrison, “Toni Morrison's 'Good' Ghosts”
If you’d like me to do more “syllabi” (reading lists), let me know. I compulsively make lists, so it doesn’t take much of a nudge to get me to indulge in one of my favorite obsessions….
Yours,
JD
PS: If you’ve made it this far, I’d like to tell you I’m beginning to think about having a book release party for my story collection that came out in April 2020. Obviously I never had a proper launch because that was the betwixt Pandemic time when all face-to-face events were canceled but before we all could quite comprehended virtual events.
Because the thought of having a five-year anniversary/launch party for my debut book that never got its launch, I’m releasing the ebook for free ($0) until October 13th (OooOooOooO).
Edit: a previous version of this newsletter said you have to use a coupon code, but the code was making the sale page result in a 404 error, so I just took it down, which I think it fixed things. If you’re still having issue downloading a copy, comment or use the contact form on my website.
PPS: If you jump straight to “Where Parallel Lines Come to Touch” you can even have the opportunity to read a subtropical ghost story of my own…
I was just re-reading part of Specters of Marx yesterday! Thinking particularly about how Derrida conceives of borders and immigration…. “Marx remains an immigrant chez nous, a glorious, sacred, accursed but still a clandestine immigrant as he was all his life. He belongs to a time of disjunction, to that ‘time out of joint’ in which is inaugurated, laboriously, painfully, tragically, a new thinking of borders, a new experience of the house, the home, and the economy. Between earth and sky. One should not rush to make of the clandestine immigrant an illegal alien or … to domesticate him. To neutralize him through naturalization. To assimilate him so as to stop frightening oneself (making oneself fear) with him. He is not part of the family, but one should not send him back, once again, him too, to the border” (219).
I love this newsletter! And I love your list of hauntings in literature. Personal favorite literary hauntings: Kazuo Ishiguro’s Pale View of the Hills (Buried Giant too, tbh), Sarah Water’s The Little Stranger, Toni Morrison’s Beloved, Susan Hill’s The Woman in Black, also really loved Rebecca Turkewitz’ collection Here in the Night