The Women Who Made Horror: Eight Gothic Halloween Audiobooks for October
Every author on this list is a woman. That is not a coincidence.
Horror and the ghost story have long been forms where women writers found permission to say what drawing-room etiquette would not accommodate: the wrong child in the family, the dead wife who will not leave, the friend who is not quite what she seems, the violence hidden underneath ordinary community life. Horror could externalise what could not be named.
It also attracted some of the most celebrated writers in the English language. Mary Shelley practically invented modern horror before she was twenty. Doris Lessing won the Nobel Prize for Literature. Edith Wharton was the first woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. Shirley Jackson’s story “The Lottery” generated the largest volume of reader mail in New Yorker history, almost all of it furious. These are not writers who drifted into horror as a lesser form. They are writers for whom horror could hold what nothing else could.
All eight titles are available on RealSAM BookClub. They span two centuries, from 1818 to 2020. There is not a weak entry among them.
Frankenstein, Mary Shelley (1818)
Read by Robert Trotter. Playing time: 7 hours 13 minutes. Halloween Audiobooks
The foundational text. Shelley was eighteen when she conceived this story during a ghost-story competition at the Villa Diodati on Lake Geneva in the summer of 1816. The other competitors were Percy Bysshe Shelley, Lord Byron, and John Polidori. She was the only one who produced something that lasted. She was twenty when it was published.
Frankenstein is often reduced to its monster, but the novel is really about abandonment: a creator who cannot face what he has made, and a creature who articulates his own suffering with devastating precision. The creature’s voice is one of the great achievements in English prose. More moving, and more troubling, than most readers expect.
The Ghost Stories of Edith Wharton, Edith Wharton (collected 1975)
Read by Peter Gray. Playing time: 12 hours.
Wharton is best known for The Age of Innocence and The House of Mirth: precise, devastating accounts of New York high society at the turn of the twentieth century. Less well known is that she spent much of her career writing ghost stories, and that the ghost stories are extraordinary. Her ghosts are not creatures of mist and horror — they are bound by social obligation, by guilt, by the judgement of others, the same forces that constrain her living characters, extended into death. This collection gathers the finest of them, covering work written from the early 1900s through to 1937, the year of her death. Twelve hours of listening, none of it wasted.
Rebecca, Daphne du Maurier (1938)
Read by Ginita Jimenez. Playing time: 18 hours 6 minutes.
“Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again.” One of the most famous opening lines in English fiction announces a novel about the particular terror of being second. An unnamed young woman marries a wealthy widower and comes to live at his imposing Cornish estate, where his dead first wife seems to occupy every room, every conversation, every glance from the staff. Du Maurier understood something essential about female invisibility: the way a woman can be made to feel like a ghost in her own life. Gothic, deeply suspenseful, and with a final act that reframes everything that came before it, Rebecca is the longest listen on this list and earns every minute.
The Lottery and Other Stories, Shirley Jackson (1949)
Read by Francine Brody. Playing time: 8 hours 18 minutes.
Jackson’s debut collection opens with “The Lottery”, which may be the most disturbing short story in the English language. A small town gathers for its annual ritual, and in nine pages Jackson exposes the violence that runs underneath ordinary community life. When it appeared in The New Yorker in June 1948, it generated the largest volume of reader mail the magazine had ever received. Almost all of it was angry. The rest of the collection is equally unsettling: Jackson had a forensic eye for the uncanny within the domestic, for the membrane between ordinary life and something else entirely. Short stories suit RealSAM well, and Jackson’s are inexhaustible.Halloween Audiobooks
The Bloody Chamber, Angela Carter (1979)
Read by Richard Armitage and Emilia Fox. Playing time: 7 hours 2 minutes.
Carter’s collection of feminist Gothic fairy tales is one of the landmark texts of twentieth century English literature, and also one of the most genuinely strange things you will ever listen to. She takes the familiar architecture of fairy tales — the innocent girl, the powerful older man, the locked room — and turns it inside out, so that what was always latent in those stories becomes explicit. Desire, danger, and female agency, in prose that is extraordinarily rich on audio. Richard Armitage and Emilia Fox reading Carter together is one of the finest audiobook pairings in recent memory.
The Woman in Black, Susan Hill (1983)
Read by William Abney. Playing time: 5 hours 2 minutes.
Arthur Kipps, a young London solicitor, travels to a remote coastal town to settle the estate of a recently deceased client. Strange things begin to happen. Hill wrote this as a deliberate homage to the M.R. James tradition of English ghost fiction, but it has long since transcended that tribute. The Woman in Black is now a tradition in its own right, known to most people through the long-running West End stage production. The novel is tighter and more frightening than any adaptation. Come to it without knowing what to expect, if you can.
The Fifth Child, Doris Lessing (1988)
Read by Pauline Munro. Playing time: 4 hours 49 minutes.
Nobel laureate Doris Lessing wrote this short, devastating novel about a suburban English family whose fifth child seems to be something fundamentally wrong. Ben is not like other children. His arrival dismantles everything the family had carefully constructed. Lessing refuses to explain what Ben is, and the horror accumulates precisely in that refusal. The Fifth Child is a novel about the unaccommodatable: the family member who makes family life impossible. It is also a book about motherhood under extreme pressure, and about the cost of acknowledging that something in your own house is not right. Brief, brutal, and unlike anything else on this list.
The Haunting of Alma Fielding, Kate Summerscale (2020)
Read by David Morrissey. Playing time: 8 hours 13 minutes. Halloween audiobooks.
The wild card, and for many readers the most rewarding. Summerscale, known for The Suspicions of Mr Whicher, here investigates a real 1938 London poltergeist case: crockery shattered, objects flew, and a young suburban housewife named Alma Fielding was at the centre of it all. The Society for Psychical Research sent an investigator named Nandor Fodor, and what followed tested both his scepticism and his assumptions about what trauma looks like. Summerscale’s book works simultaneously as true crime, social history, and ghost story, set against a Britain that already sensed something terrible was approaching. Read by David Morrissey, it is the most unusual entry on this list and possibly the best.
Listen to all eight Halloween audiobooks on RealSAM BookClub Halloween audiobooks
All eight titles are available in the RNIB Talking Book library and easily accessible through the RealSAM BookClub service, now available on any device from £5.99 a month. Start your book on one device and pick it up on another; BookClub will remember where you left off.
