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Read & watch: A guide to unconventional chills for Halloween

I have been thinking a lot about Halloween this week, since I am of an age where the holiday both means friends are dressing up their infant children for the first time, while other friends are still eagerly embracing the opportunity to throw a rager. And as someone who has always been something of a coward, I have also been thinking about what scary culture I like and why. So, if you making plans for All Hallows Eve, here are five alternatives to liquor or trick-or-treating:

1. Sharp Objects, by Gillian Flynn: I was disappointed by Gone Girl when I first read it, though Flynn’s twisty novel of a marriage gone badly wrong grew on me steadily with several re-readings. The shock of Gone Girl did not come close to preparing me for the nightmare that is “Sharp Objects,” Flynn’s first novel, which follows a tormented journalist, Camille Preaker, who returns to her hometown to report on the murder of a teenage girl, an assignment that returns Camille to the setting of her sister’s death. Sharp Objects is a well-crafted murder mystery with a reasonably surprising and upsetting conclusion, and a queasy explanation of the psychology of self-harm. The book is is all about the ugly things mothers can do to their daughters and women and girls can do to their friends without making motherhood or female friendship seem inherently damaged and ugly.

2. Nightcrawler, by Dan Gilroy: If you fancy a Halloween out at the movies, my pick for a new release weekend would be “Nightcrawler,” which is both very funny and very tense. Jake Gyllenhaal plays Lou Bloom, a product of “the self-esteem movement so popular in our schools,” which for him means pursuing a variety of hustles with an amoral enthusiasm. Lou achieves his greatest success when he starts taking video of crime scenes to sell to local news stations and hooks up with a desperate executive. It turns out that it is easy to get up close to dead and terribly injured people and to film them rather than help them if you do not really see them as human and worthy of empathy, and if you are not particularly afraid of the police or public censure.

3. The Secret History, by Donna Tartt: I hated The Goldfinch with all the disappointed rage I could muster, but must of my frustration with Donna Tartt’s Pulitzer-prize winning novel stemmed from the fact that I just loved her first book so darn much. If you have not yet read The Secret History, you might have heard it referenced a lot this fall in relation to “How To Get Away With Murder.” Like Tartt’s novel, Pete Nowalk’s show starts by telling you that a murder has happened and then explaining the events that lead up to it. Tartt’s chilling book is testament to the idea that things that go bump in the night or that come out of nowhere may have the power to shock, but the real terror is in the slow slide away from yourself and what you thought were your hard moral limits.

4. “Zodiac,” directed by David Fincher: Combining two other things on this list, Jake Gyllenhaal and director Fincher, who adapted Gone Girl for the screen, “Zodiac” is among my favorite movies of the last decade. Following the journalists and cops who tried to track down the Zodiac Killer, Fincher takes you unnerving deep inside the murderous affect during the film’s scenes of violence and generates some of his scariest scenes from the characters’ own anxieties rather than any actual threat.

5. “Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy,” by John lé Carre and directed by Thomas Alfredson: Maybe it is weird to include a classic of the spy genre in a Halloween round-up. But the Cambridge spy ring has always had an element of horror to it, both in history and here in fiction. Double lives are unsettling things, as is the need to investigate and reevaluate the most significant relationships of your life. Lé Carre has always known something that plenty of more baroque scare writers could learn from: the mundane monsters often get away with far more than the obvious ones.

Both the novel and Thomas Alfredson’s recent movie adaptation are terrific.



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