What Noelle McCarthy and Tom Sainsbury are reading for Halloween

Intrigued by horror novels but too scared to jump in? Here are some (mostly) short, eerie reads to get you started.

Comedian Tom Sainsbury is on Nmy Substack this week, sharing reading picks for Halloween. I've already outed myself as a Dracula tragic with my memoir Stakes and Tom’s a proper horror aficionado – he’s written, directed and starred in his own psychological thriller, Loop Track, about some bad stuff happening to an anxious man in the bush. Below are some of our top reads to get your spine tingling and the hairs on the back of your neck standing straight up of their own volition.

Tom Sainsbury: Well, we're both Stephen King stans, and the one that came to mind is The Tommyknockers. This is his alien/spaceship one, and it’s so B Grade…I've got a real soft spot for this, even though I think it's highly flawed.

Noelle McCarthy: But you know we love B grade. 

TS: So, the general premise is that a spacecraft is found buried in someone's backyard. They dig it up, and it starts having a physiological effect on them. It starts having a physiological and psychological effect on the town, in fact. Everyone starts going crazy and turning translucent, and all the vegetables start growing huge, and all this kind of stuff. But eventually, someone makes it into the spacecraft. The aliens in there are dead, but they're kind of frozen in battle... There's just something around that wee chapter where they’re discovered that I love so much because you're like- what? Who are these aliens? What’s happening? He doesn't give you enough to understand who they are, what they are. But you know that they're vicious and they were fighting and that probably led to the crash.

NMC: That’s such a good setup.I don’t do it with the aliens, as a rule. I remember my uncle Len showing me Plan Nine from Outer Space at a really impressionable time in my life. Just seeing those Ed Wood spinning hubcaps in the sky kind of ruined it for me, wrecked all that Roswell kind of stuff for me for life. But I love the title- The Tommyknockers, extremely creepy. I think I need to go back to it. This is one of your OG faves, Tom, isn’t it?

TS: I think so, one of my OG enjoyable ones anyway.

NMC: My first pick is a short story, for all the readers living in a small town: Shirley Jackson’s The Lottery.

TS: I mean, what a short story! What a premise! Incredible. 

NMC: What I adore about this, Tom, is the accretion of detail. How she builds up the moment. A small community, a tightly knit community of people – they could be in The Tommyknockers – they’re going about their daily chores quickly, because they have somewhere to be… They have to all gather together in order to enact an ancient ritual.

I won’t tell you what it is, in case you haven’t heard of The Lottery. I think you need to come to it fresh. When I read it first, I did not know what was about to happen. That made it so much more enjoyable and horrible. It’s a truly nasty little piece of work by Shirley Jackson. She published it in The New Yorker, it caused an outcry. People were horrified, and with good reason. It’s often imitated, never bettered.

TS: I absolutely love The Lottery so much, but we can’t talk about it. We can’t. But I highly recommend it as well.

 So, my next one is short too, and by an American woman as well. It’s The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman.

NMC: Oooh yes, we studied this in university. I remember we had the creepiest lecturer, who had the most amazing voice, like a metronome. One of those flat, affectless voices. She talked a lot about psychosis.

TS: Oh my God, she would have been perfect for this. I also studied this one, at an impressionable age, probably 20 or 19 in a short story paper at Auckland University. It blew my mind. It’s about a woman at the turn of the 19th Century and she’s put in a rest home because of her hysteria. She’s a hysterical woman and they hide her away in this rest home. And because she can’t occupy her mind in any other way, she starts seeing things in the wallpaper – the hideous yellow wallpaper of the bedroom.

I love this story truly because you don’t know if this is a haunting, like an actual ghost story, or if it’s a psychosis story.That’s what’s so beautiful about it.

NMC: Oooh yes psychological horror – it’s a deeply unreliable narrator looking at her four walls. 

TS: Something amazing that this one and The Lottery and The Tommy-Knockers all have in common, and something I really love in horror writing, is when the writer hints at something, but doesn’t give you the answers. And so it is with The Yellow Wallpaper. There are bars on the window of the room that she’s in, so she’s thinking this room has been used to imprison someone before….

NMC: Yeah, it’s plausible and her testimony is all you’ve got. There’s the whole feminist side of it too, and this idea of a woman being incarcerated for being a hysteric. These ideas of control and isolation and paranoia, all these great, great horror themes. 

I wasn’t going to include this next one, but as we’re talking about psychological thrillers, I got this free in a pile outside Featherston Library recently: Henry James's The Turn of the Screw. Another novella. A  banger. This will really freak you out.

TS: OK, brilliant. So my next one is a novel, a Japanese novel called The Woman in the Dunes by Kōbō Abe. 

I would call it a surrealist horror and the premise is that an entomologist is going to the sand dunes to find insects for his study. He sees that there’s a kind of a village but it’s all sunk into the dunes, surrounded by sand. He’s kind of helped down into this one house where a woman lives, then the townsfolk pull up the pulley, so he can’t escape. 

NMC: Always the townsfolk.

TS: So every time he tries to climb up the dunes, he just kind of slides back down, and he’s trapped in there with this woman. They have a passionate relationship but the sand’s filling up the house, so every day they have to spend all their days filling up buckets to take it out and it’s a kind of a losing battle. They’re constantly battling the sand. It’s obviously surreal, but I read it as a metaphor for modern life and societal pressures- tax, and domestic life and getting married and all that. But it’s gorgeous. It’s so strange and wonderful.

NMC: It’s like mortality, isn’t it? The sands of time. How did you come across this one?

TS: I was living in London at the time, and I was living with this very eccentric flatmate, and he just kind of handed it to me. He’s like, “I think you might like this.” I was like, “You do? How do you know that I love this?” And I did, I loved it so much.

You can watch the full video interview on Substack or listen to Tell It Slant wherever you get your podcasts.