Jen Williams lives in London with her partner and their small ridiculous cat. A fan of pirates and dark folklore from an early age, these days she writes horror-tinged crime thrillers with strong female leads as well as character-driven fantasy novels with plenty of banter and magic. In 2015 she was nominated for Best Newcomer in the British Fantasy Awards.
[My Book, The Movie: Games for Dead Girls]
Williams's new novel is The Hungry Dark.
At CrimeReads she tagged her "five favourite books about Hauntings (which are really books about Bad Places, and Terrible People). One title on the list:
Beyond Black by Hilary MantelRead about the other entries on the list.
Now you could say that I am throwing out my thesis in my second example, because surely Hilary Mantel’s wonderful book about a genuine psychic haunted by theghosts of her past is not about place at all, but about Alison herself, a woman slowly run ragged by the diabolical men, long dead, who made her childhood a living hell. I would argue that it is still very much about place. In Beyond Black, the very landscape of England feels haunted as Alison flits between pubs and working men’s clubs, plying her trade. Here, you feel, you can’t walk down the road without being accosted by some dreadful little spirit. And the idea of England being thick with spirits and strangeness is present in Mantel’s Booker Prize-winning Wolf Hall trilogy too. I think Mantel understood the nature of haunting better than any of us.
Beyond Black is among Katya Apekina's eight books about characters with psychic abilities, M. M. DeLuca's five top books that feature mediums & the spirit world, Isaac Fellman's five books that feel like a trippy haunted house, Laura Purcell's ten top books about spirit mediums, Jess Kidd's ten essential supernatural mysteries, and Sarah Porter's five top books with unusual demons and devils.
--Marshal Zeringue
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