Once Upon a Twilight!: Top Five

Welcome to our stop on The Fall tour for Bethany Griffin. This tour is hosted by Rockstar Book Tour.

The Fall
Author: Bethany Griffin
Reading Level: Young Adult
Genre: Horror | Paranormal | Retellings
Released: October 7th 2014

Madeline Usher is doomed.

She has spent her life fighting fate, and she thought she was succeeding. Until she woke up in a coffin.

Ushers die young. Ushers are cursed. Ushers can never leave their house, a house that haunts and is haunted, a house that almost seems to have a mind of its own. Madeline’s life—revealed through short bursts of memory—has hinged around her desperate plan to escape, to save herself and her brother. Her only chance lies in destroying the house.

In the end, can Madeline keep her own sanity and bring the house down? The Fall is a literary psychological thriller, reimagining Edgar Allan Poe’s classic The Fall of the House of Usher.

Top 5 of the spookiest scary stories you have ever read!

I’ll start off by saying I’m a wimp, and one of the most irritating wimps ever, because I’m really attracted to spooky things, but I’m not a real horror story lover. For one thing (despite writing the Masque books which feature lots of dead bodies), I’m really freaked out by gore, and I don’t really like to be scared for the sake of being scared. What I like is to invest in characters and care so deeply that I don’t want them to get hurt, so a book where a character I love is in danger is the worst sort of horror for me.

1. The Fall of the House of Usher- I read this in either 7th or 8th grade, and it stayed with me. Why? Because I’d never read anything so atmospheric, there isn’t anything like the atmosphere Poe created in that story, you had to practically slog through his descriptions to find out what was going on with the Ushers, but once you got there it was really scary. And the disease that affected the Ushers was so weird and unusual seeming it felt like something that could really happen. And the idea of being buried alive? It was so awful, particularly when Roderick admits that they put Madeline living in her tomb. Everything about this story unsettled 7th grade me.

2. It by Stephen King. Stephen King is my favorite author, but I mostly love his fantasy stuff (The Talisman, the Dark Tower, the Stand). IT is my favorite that comes across as scary/spooky. The first scene is one of those that stay with you forever, and even though I’ve never had a particular fear of clowns or of things in storm drains, the whole ‘we all float down here’ refrain, the idea of some indefinable evil preying on a town, and then everyone forgetting/not connecting the dots, as the kids in the story connect the dots it reminded me a lot of childhood, of seeing certain things that adults don’t see, and not being able to make them understand, and just the sense of peril as these kids battle the evil. It’s such an epic book, and the movie does not come close to doing it justice.

3. Shadowland by Peter Straub, because it’s weird and creepy and scary in all the right ways. It features misfits and a prep school and real magic and fake magic and sacrifice, and a kid morphing himself into a monster, and I’ve never quite been sure of everything that happened in the book, even on multiple readings. Weirdly, the fact that I can never exactly pinpoint what this book is about is one of the things that I love most about it.

4. The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman- This story about madness was a huge inspiration for The Fall (in fact there is an homage to it in the Fall). It’s the story about a woman who’s been deemed hysterical and locked away in a room and the things that go through her mind, and the horror of it really overwhelmed me the first time I read it. And yes, this is totally an English-major type choice, but I can’t help it.

5. The Road by Cormac McCarthy. This is the scariest thing I’ve ever read. Why? Because it looks so deeply at the darkness inside of humans, the depths we’re capable of, the pure evil? Because that evil is juxtaposed by the purity of a small child and the desperation of a father trying to save him? None of these are new themes (and in fact I’ll mention Swan Song by Robert McCammon in which I first read, and was horrified by, these same themes) but perhaps it’s because The Road is so beautifully written, it’s like poetry, but poetry about death and destruction and a desperation so huge that I couldn’t stop turning the page, even though I was terrified by what I might find on the next page. I bought myself a copy and immediately swore never to read it again because it unsettled me so much.

Bethany Griffin is a high school English teacher who prides herself on attracting creative misfits to elective classes like Young Adult Literature, Creative Writing, and Speculative Literature. She is the author of HANDCUFFS, MASQUE OF THE RED DEATH, DANCE OF THE RED DEATH, GLITTER AND DOOM, and THE FALL. She lives with her family in Kentucky.