Fresh from the success of her Darkwood series, Gabby Hutchinson Crouch – an author and seasoned writer of satire for TV and radio – has a new offering.
Wish You Weren’t Here tells the story of the Rook family, avid ghost hunters. That’s why she curated this selection of creepy tales penned by women which will have you suitably unsettled.
The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson
A classic of the haunted house genre, this is more about female repression than ghosts. The house itself feels malevolent, eating the identity of women. The mundanity of the domestic details in Jackson’s narrative throw the creepiness into sharp contrast.
The Man in the Picture by Susan Hill
I find this scarier than The Woman in Black. Haunted pictures. Brr. There’s a lot of polite toing and froing about who gets to have a cursed painting – it’s all so British.
Agata’s Machine by Camilla Grudova
All of The Doll’s Alphabet is unsettling, full of decay and tinned meat obsessions, but Agata’s Machine, a story about a haunted sewing machine that projects the ghost of a scary, sexy clown, is my favourite.
The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman
As in Jackson’s work, here a woman’s repression is so crushing that it manifests as a haunting. Slowly working out what’s actually wrong with the room is where the true horror lies.
