If you’re looking for a post-Halloween thrill more lasting than the adrenaline rush of a slasher film, here’s a recommendation: Valancourt Books. Valancourt is a small independent publisher in Richmond, Virginia, that specializes in rediscovered horror fiction. Founded in 2005, Valancourt began by reissuing Gothic fiction from the late 18th and early 19th centuries. In 2012, founders James Jenkins and Ryan Cagle realized that there were also undiscovered classics from the 1970s and 1980s that deserved a second look.
They’ve unearthed some genuinely great books from the 1980s, including Jack Cady’s The Well, Frank De Felitta’s Golgotha Falls, and Michael Talbot’s chilling Night Things.
Maybe it’s because writers still used typewriters in the 1980s, or because the Internet had not emerged and quickly become clogged with imitators and fan-fiction websites, but these books are plotted with much more care and detail than most of the tossed-off supernatural fiction of today, particularly the teen-targeted Twilight series. Valancourt’s books are immersive, weird, individualistic, and sometimes unclassifiable and outré.
The best find among Valancourt’s list is the work of Michael McDowell. McDowell was a prolific author of ghost stories and supernatural tales in the 1980s and up to the time of his death from AIDS in 1999. He wrote screenplays for several TV shows and films, including Tim Burton’s Beetlejuice and The Nightmare Before Christmas. Stephen King once called McDowell “the finest writer of paperback originals in America today.”
Valancourt’s McDowell collection includes books such as The Amulet, Cold Moon Over Babylon, and Gilded Needles. These are not slapdash fright-night books tossed off to make a quick buck. McDowell earned a master’s degree in English from Harvard and a Ph.D. in English and American literature from Brandeis. He was a writer of the first rank.
My personal favorite is The Elementals (1981). The novel begins at the funeral of Marian Savage, the matriarch of the venerable southern Savage family. The ceremony includes a bizarre incident, and afterwards the family goes to the Alabama coast for the summer. They are staying next to a house that is abandoned and slowly being consumed by a massive sand dune. One of the characters, a thirteen-year-old girl named India McCray, wonders what is in the empty home. She starts to investigate—defying the orders of the wise old maid who knows the family history, of course—and sure enough, things begin to get creepy.
I won’t spoil what unfolds over the next 200 pages, I’ll only say that if you pick up The Elementals you’ll be treated to one of the best haunted house tales ever written, one that will stay with you long after Halloween has come and gone.
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