Five books that feel like a trippy haunted house

Isaac Fellman is the author of The Breath of the Sun (published under his pre-transition first name), which won the 2019 Lambda Literary Award for LGBT Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Horror. He is an archivist at a queer historical society in San Francisco.

His new novel is Dead Collections.

At Tor.com Fellman tagged "five novels that make me feel as if any structure I read them in—the break room, my studio apartment, a bus shelter, a train—is a haunted house," including:

Beyond Black by Hilary Mantel

A rare foray into genre for Mantel, this is a bitterly funny novel about the English spirit mediums who still ply their trade at seedy theaters and fairs. Alison, Mantel’s unwillingly psychic heroine, is one of those people who live their lives like chess kings, moving in and out of check. A survivor of much childhood trauma and adult loneliness, she’s learned to care for herself in ways that are only a bit self-destructive, and to find helpers who are only mostly terrible, and to live with the dead. Then the tender equilibrium of her life falls apart.

Mantel is a great poet of dissociation, and she’s unusual for her neutral, thoughtful take on what it means to live outside of your body. In book after book, she explores characters who use dissociation to live, like extremophile bacteria, in dangerous situations. Alison is an exception. Mantel portrays her psychic ability—which shows her everything from historical atrocities that took place in her suburban subdivision, to the ghosts of her abusers, to the pain of death—as an inability to dissociate, a constant awareness of everything. The result is a tense, fascinating book full of Dickensian characters and unexpected set pieces. I don’t love all of Beyond Black’s decisions, but it’s my favorite kind of genre writing: a book that explores the psychological consequences of power, including magical power.

Read about the other entries on the list.

Beyond Black is among 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