For our second post on Hallowe’en reads, we will give you some alternatives to the hefty Gothic novels we discussed back in October. Sometimes you want something that can be read in an evening; a ghost story before bed, a creepy tale over a cup of tea, or a book that will give you just enough nightmares to make turning off the light a bad idea.
Fortunately here in Ireland, we have an excellent tradition of shorter supernatural fiction and these Irish tales can be read while the sun sets and it gets darker and colder, but keep a hot drink nearby. From Sheridan Le Fanu’s unsettling Green Tea to the strange stories of Elizabeth Bowen and Edward Drax Plunkett (known by his British title of Lord Dunsany), Irish and Anglo-irish writers have been proving for generations that you don’t need hundreds of pages to create a genuinely disturbing story. We’ll include a few recommendations for younger readers who are ready to discover Irish horror for themselves.
Sheridan Le Fanu’s Green Tea
Le Fanu is one of the major figures of Irish Gothic literature and a pioneer of supernatural fiction. We already mentioned Carmilla, probably his best-known work today, but his short stories are equally good at creating a sense that something is terribly wrong, without explaining too clearly what that something is.
Green Tea follows a clergyman, the Rev. Jennings, confiding in the occult doctor Martin Hesselius, that something has been following him: a small, spectral monkey that only he can see. The horror comes from the uncertainty. Is the creature supernatural? Is Jennings losing his mind? Is there something genuinely following him? Le Fanu refuses to give the reader a comfortable answer. This is what makes the story work so well; the fear is not just at the creature itself, it’s the possibility that we can no longer trust what we’re seeing.
Perfect for: a late-night Halloween read when you want something genuinely unsettling without committing to a full novel.
Elizabeth Bowen: Ghosts without the Clichés
Writer Elizabeth Bowen moves well beyond the ghost story clichés of haunted castles, rattling chains and Victorian portraits, to offer something very different.
Bowen was an Anglo-Irish writer of the first half of the 20th century, whose short fiction often explores the uncanny through ordinary places and situations. Her ghost stories are interested in the uncomfortable possibility that something is present where it shouldn’t be. Literary critics have particularly noted the ghostly and Gothic qualities of her short fiction.
Stories such as The Shadowy Third and The Cat Jumps are good places to begin. Bowen’s ghosts tend to be subtle. They linger around relationships, houses and memories, making the familiar suddenly feel strange. The Demon Lover and The Happy Autumn Fields (both set during the London Blitz) cast an eerie light on how war leaves the past and present blurred. They are subtle, unsettling and very short. That can make her stories particularly effective at night; Bowen creates the uncomfortable feeling that something has changed, something in your life has shifted, and you’re not quite sure what.
Perfect for: readers who prefer psychological horror and unsettling atmosphere to outright horror and scares.
Lord Dunsany: Strange Worlds and darker fairy tales
If you want something that feels more like a dark fairy tale, try Edward John Moreton Drax Plunkett, known by his title of Lord Dunsany. He was heir to one of the oldest aristocratic peerages in Ireland and one of its largest landed estates. He was born in London and grew up in Kent, before moving to the family estates in Meath, in an area just to the northwest of Dublin (now the heart of the commuter belt). He returned to Kent in 1947 but died on a trip to Dublin in 1957.
He was a second lieutenant in the Coldstream Guards during the Second Boer War and served during the First World War as a Captain in the Royal Inniskilling Fusiliers. He was stationed for a time at Ebrington Barracks in Derry where, hearing while on leave of the Easter Rising of 1916 in Dublin, he drove there to “offer help” and was wounded by a bullet lodged in his skull.
But it is as a writer that he is most widely known. His enormous body of work, much of it written in Dunsany Castle, ranged across fantasy, mythology, fairy tales and the supernatural. His stories can be wonderfully strange, often creating entire sharp and macabre worlds in only a few pages.
His work is an important reminder that sometimes the most unsettling stories are the ones where the rules of the world itself seem to have changed. For Halloween, try his 1912 story The Hoard of the Gibbelins for something darkly fantastical, or explore some of Dunsany’s shorter tales and see where the strange logic of his worlds takes you.
Perfect for: readers who like their Halloween stories weird, fantastical and slightly surreal.
Peadar Ó Guilín’s The Call
If these older, classic works sound intimidating or slightly removed from our own experience, there is plenty of Irish horror written in modern times that may also interest younger readers.
Peadar Ó Guilín’s 2016 novel The Call is a particularly good choice for young adult readers. The premise is horrifyingly simple: every teenager in Ireland will eventually be “Called”. Without warning, they are transported to the terrifying otherworld of the Sídhe. Unlike mainland European counterparts, the fairies of Irish legends are cruel tricksters, so for the children of the Call they have just a small chance of surviving and returning home.
The book draws heavily on darker elements of Irish mythology, combining the world of the Sídhe with the survival-horror structure of a modern thriller. The result is fast-paced, frightening and very different from the traditional haunted-house story. And because the characters are teenagers themselves, it offers an obvious entry point for younger readers who might not be drawn to Dracula or Melmoth the Wanderer.
Perfect for: those who want horror, fantasy and Irish mythology with plenty of action.
Skulduggery Pleasant by Derek Landy
For younger readers who like fantasy, humour and supernatural adventure, Derek Landy’s Skulduggery Pleasant series is a great place to start.
It’s witty, fast-moving and full of magic, monsters, detectives and danger. It is not traditional Gothic horror, but it introduces many of the ingredients that make darker fantasy so enjoyable. Skullduggery is a skeleton sorcerer and detective who, with the help of his new trainee, is hell-bent on stopping supernatural threats to the world. These are fast-paced action detective books that throw in a good bit of fantasy and humour among the horror, leaving us a great way to get younger readers into the genre.
And once readers are comfortable with skeleton detectives and supernatural villains, the leap to ghosts and Gothic fiction won’t seem quite so large.
The Saga of Darren Shan and The Demonata by Darren Shan
If vampires and demons are what first attracted you to this kind of horror or unsettling reading, Darren Shan’s books offer a much darker route into supernatural fiction. The Saga follows young Darren Shan as he is forced into a world of war between vampires and uber-vampires after a trip to the circus, sparking a cascade of events that will shake both the world he left and the one he finds himself in. The Demonata is where Shan cranks up the gore and horror, weaving three stories of demonic invasions and “blessed” children across a series “in blood stepp’d in so far”. I took inspiration from some of the descriptions and action sequences for an essay in my English class when I was 14/15 and was asked to see the teacher after class as a result; you can’t get a higher recommendation that that!
The series is packed with vampires, monsters, death and increasingly dark situations, making it a natural stepping stone for readers who have outgrown children’s fantasy but aren’t quite ready for the Victorian Gothic classics.
Summary
If you only have time for a few stories this Halloween, here’s where I recommend you start:
- For classic horror: Sheridan Le Fanu’s Green Tea
- For ghosts: Elizabeth Bowen’s The Shadowy Third
- For dark fantasy: Lord Dunsany’s The Hoard of the Gibbelins
- For modern Irish horror: Peadar Ó Guilín’s The Call
- For younger readers: Skulduggery Pleasant or The Saga of Darren Shan
The great thing about Irish horror is that there is no one way to read it. You can spend an evening with a Victorian ghost story, disappear into one of Dunsany’s strange fantasy worlds, or pick up a modern YA novel rooted in the mythology of Ireland. So if you’re looking for something short, scary and Irish this Halloween, you don’t need to wait for midnight.
Although, perhaps, that’s when you should read Green Tea.