They might not be raindrops on roses or whiskers on kittens, but that doesn’t mean that we love them any less. Welcome back to My Favorite Things, the weekly column where we grab someone in speculative circles to gab about the greatest in geek. This week, we sit down with Michael Rowe, whose latest novel, October, came out in trade paperback and hardcover from ChiZine this very month — October! Appropriate, given the title, don’t you think?

What does Michael love when he’s not writing what award-winner Lee Thomas calls a “terrifying story of social persecution, black magic, and desire gone horrifically wrong”? Spoiler alert: a great number of classic ghost stories that will leave you craving more, another ghost story that speaks to his roots as a horror writer, and everyone’s favorite season (and if it isn’t, it should be!). Curious? Read on to learn more!

The ghost stories of Susan Hill are among my favorite things. I was introduced to Hill’s work through the terrifying ITV broadcast film of her seminal novel The Woman in Black. While everyone knows the 2012 version starring Daniel Radcliffe, the 1989 ITV version will always be the definitive version, and not simply because it’s closer to Hill’s novel than the admittedly gorgeous 2012 outing to Eel Marsh House and the haunted, doomed village of Crythin Gifford.

The first thing I suggest to people who rave about “that Daniel Radcliffe ghost movie” is that they read the novel upon which it is based, posthaste. As a great lover of classic English ghost stories from the golden age of that subgenre, which spans roughly from the 1880s to the 1920s, Susan Hill’s eight volumes of ghost stories are a gift of incomparable richness. Between 1983 and 2016 she published The Woman in Black  (1983), The Mist in the Mirror (1992), The Man in the Picture (2007), The Small Hand (2010), Dolly: A Ghost Story (2012), Printer’s Devil Court (2014), The Travelling Bag and Other Stories  (2017), as well as an omnibus collection titled The Woman in Black and Other Ghost Stories: The Collected Ghost Stories of Susan Hill (2015), containing The Woman in Black, The Man in the Picture, The Small Hand, Dolly, and Printer’s Devil Court. 

I would honestly be hard-pressed to pick a favorite, but I’ll try. The terror quotient isn’t the criteria because all the novels are genuinely terrifying, though elegantly in a way that is unique to Ms. Hill. This is the terror of rainy English autumn graveyards, of long corridors in old manor houses and ancient schools with darkness waiting hungrily at the other end. Of Christmas ghost stories that only hint at their dreadful provenance. Of tiny, invisible hands slipped into yours, of haunted dolls, of carnivorous oil paintings hanging in in Cambridge dons’ rooms — very English in the best sort of way.

I’ve read and re-read The Mist in the Mirror several times, and often listen to the exceptional audiobook of it narrated by Matt Addis on long plane flights. Of all her books it’s the one that feels most like an old friend. It’s the story of the orphaned, world-traveling Sir James Monmouth, who unburdens himself in a manuscript detailing his haunting by the ghost of a little boy who eventually leads him to the remote and desolate Kittiscar Hall, which, in turn, holds the secrets of Monmouth’s own mysterious origins, as well as the origins of the haunting. The Mist is less well known than her titanic The Woman in Black, but it’s every bit as chilling, every bit as rich, luxurious and detailed — a novel the reader visits and inhabits rather than just reads.  Perhaps that’s Hill’s gift in a nutshell: she as is much a hostess in her haunted world as she is the author of it. Best of all, far more so than the originators of the classic English ghost story, Hill skillfully renders multidimensional interpersonal relationships — marriages, friendships, the complicated interdependence of adults and children. This in turn imbues the stories with a vividness that lifts them far above and beyond any mere genre.

While devotees of contemporary horror fiction might be tempted to dismiss Hill’s classic themes as something passé without having read any of her books, it would be a colossal error to do so. Hers is the work of a first-class contemporary literary writer, one whose talent illuminates and reinvents a subgenre, making it as relevant to today’s readers as the best of anything else in the field. Furthermore, it’s a master class for any aspiring writer of supernatural fiction.

My advice? Pick up one of the omnibus editions, because when you’ve shivered your way through your first Susan Hill with every light in the house on, you’re going to crave another. Yield to that craving.  Own it.

From the haunted halls of Edwardian England to Halloween in mid-century small-town America, another of my favorite things is Frank LaLoggia’s film Lady in White.  It’s a ghost story, a coming of age story, and, most importantly, it’s a writer’s story.

On Halloween night in 1962, two bullies playing a trick lock nine-year old Frankie Scarlatti (played by a young Lukas Haas) inside the cloakroom at his school. While held prisoner in the dark, he witnesses the supernatural recreation of a child murder than had occurred a decade before. When the killer comes to the cloakroom in search of a clue he feels he may have left behind and instead finds Frankie, he nearly murders him as well.

Alone and near death on the cloakroom floor, Frankie is brought back to life by the ghost of Melissa Ann Montgomery, the girl whose spectral murder he had just witnessed. She begs him to help her find her mother. Frankie agrees, and that search becomes the arc of LaLoggia’s beautiful and heartbreaking jewel of a film.

Aside from everything else, in telling the story of a nine-year old boy’s devotion to helping the ghost of a ten-year old girl find her mother, LaLoggia pays homage to the instinctive, tender friendships boys and girls can share before they are more or less forced into the gender segregation that society and puberty often demands.

But there’s so much more to Lady in White.

Set against the fractured social landscape of the Civil Rights era, the film explores discriminatory small-town racial politics when an African American janitor is accused being Frankie’s would-be murderer. LaLoggia doesn’t flinch from the tragic result of that false accusation. On a more interior level, it’s a poignant portrayal of the relationships between brothers growing up in a sprawling, multi-generational immigrant Italian family in the 1960s, and a portrait of the bonds and limits of friendship. Each of those themes is sketched with incomparable skill, and with all the humor required to keep them from turning ponderous and lecturing, as they might in the hands of a lesser filmmaker than LaLoggia.

Mostly though, to me, it’s a portrait of a nine-year old aspiring horror writer and the shaping-by-experience that all writers go through to one degree or another.

Everyone who loves Lady in White as much as I do has a favorite scene. Mine occurs towards the end of the film, when Frankie arrives home from riding his bike around Willowpoint Falls and rushes into his bedroom to discover a package on his desk. With shaking hands he opens it and takes out his first typewriter, his prize for selling a certain number of Christmas cards. The look on Frankie’s face as he caresses the typewriter brings me to tears with every annual watching of the film. I was Frankie’s age, nine, when my late mother gave me my first typewriter at Christmas in 1972. It had been hers in college, and she’d saved it all those years.

“Enjoy it in good health!” my mother said, with her usual formality. But what she really meant was, Here you go. Make something of this. Become a writer if that’s what you want to do. Just work hard and do it well. Make us proud.

Lady in White opens with the adult Franklin Scarlatti, now a bestselling novelist, returning home to Willowpoint Falls. Like the best ghost stories, it begins with the protagonist having a conversation about his life with an unsuspecting third party, at which point the story of his life, and his hauntings, opens and unfolds like a dark orchid.

The ghosts in Lady in White aren’t merely the spectres of Melissa Ann Montgomery and her mother. They’re also the ghosts of innocence and its inevitable loss, the ghosts of nostalgia for a time when falling asleep in your room, surrounded by your Aurora Monster Models monsters, was just a matter of closing your eyes. They’re the ghosts of a time when believing something unbelievable was simply a matter of seeing it, and when the notion of “going home” was as unimaginable as it was unnecessary, because you were already safely there.

In the end, October might well be the perfect time to have asked someone like me about my favorite things, because so many of my favorite things are seasonal, or at least seasonal-adjacent.  It’s entirely possible I didn’t know exactly how seasonal until this very moment of writing.

Michael and his brother in Ottawa, in 1970

Autumn is not only my favorite season; it’s one of my favorite things.

When I was a little boy, I lived in Beirut and Havana where my father, a Canadian diplomat, was posted to the Canadian embassies to those countries.

The color palette of my early childhood was, in the first instance, a neutral desert palette of cream, sand and white. In the second instance, it was a semi-tropical, semi-Caribbean palette of vibrant primary colors — fuchsia, bright blue, emerald. It was the malachite green of the sea under the warm grey clouds, the shocking pink of the bougainvillea bordering our patio, and the bright yellow of the banana trees in our garden.

In neither instance did the palette include autumnal reds and oranges.

Those I saw only in books and in the Halloween issues of Jack and Jill magazine. My American-born mother may have festooned our house in Havana with orange cardboard pumpkins and black and gold witches in October, and I may have seen similar imagery and colors at the children’s Halloween parties at the British embassy, but it wasn’t until the fall of 1969, when we returned to Ottawa, that I experienced autumn for real: the bright leaves falling and crunching under my boots, the cold fall days and nights, the scent of leaves burning in piles on people’s lawns, and real door-to-door trick-or-treating.

The fall of 1969 was the beginning of a love affair with the season, one that still endures to this day. Perhaps if I had experienced autumn since infancy, that first one might have had less of an impact than it did, but to experience it for the first time at seven was defining.

I have since measured all the places I’ve lived by their autumns. When we lived in Geneva, Switzerland in the mid-70s, when my father was posted to the United Nations, the fall struck me as prim, and as neutral as Switzerland itself. Geneva is a temperate, often-rainy city in the fall and winter, perpetually modulated by its proximity to Lake Leman, upon whose edge it perches. Autumn held no particular drama. Fortunately for me, my American friends at the international school my brother and I attended seemed to likewise pine for a proper autumn, and they always made an effort to celebrate the season with dances and football games and Halloween parties as though they were still home in the States instead of nestled in one of the most romantic regions of Europe.

Toronto Necropolis

Later, as a teenager at boarding school in western Canada, the loneliness of that first year away from home was mitigated by a spectacular October of wide, cold blue prairie skies and trees on fire with bright yellow and orange leaves.

When I graduated in 1981, I spent my first adult autumn in Paris, where I was working as a model. That fall exists in my memory as an Impressionist tableau of burnt umber chestnut leaves against elegant cream and gold hôtels particuliers; of the gradually deepening aquatint foliage of the Jardin des Tuileries and Places des Vosges; of the bordello red and gold-flocked wallpaper of the once-grand prewar apartment where I was staying with a female model from Copenhagen, a male model from New York City, and my childhood friend from Ottawa, Lesley, who was just then beginning the stellar ascent that would make her one of the top European models of the ’80s; of the cold, invigorating wind that blew off the Seine as we pulled our coats tighter; of the sight of impossibly rangy Scandinavian models in with cropped chrysanthemum haircuts rushing to bookings with tote bags slung over their shoulders, sporting Walkman cassette players before really anyone else did.

And, and essential component part of that tableau is that marvelous fragrance that I’ve only ever found in Paris in the fall — a bewitching, pungent attar that could be a mixture of Gauloise cigarette smoke, excellent perfume, and roasted chestnuts from a street vendor’s hotplate, served in a paper cone, but could also just as easily be a mélange of history, glamour, memory, youth, promise, possibility, and the eternal yearning for romance. Paris is like that, and never more so than when you’re nineteen, on a rainy autumn afternoon sipping chocolat chaud, watching the world go by through the windows of a warm café, dreaming about who you’ll become some day, and who will eventually love you.

In the late 1980s, in my mid-twenties my big sister Nancy was living in Western Massachusetts. I started to visit her in mid-October, first in Heath and then, later, in Warwick, which began a lifelong love affair with New England, which is also one of my favorite things.  Fall makes more sense to me in New England than anywhere else in the world.

Beckett in the Toronto Necropolis

But even though I don’t live in any of those places today, I still somehow draw their memories around me like a warm, rust-coloured shawl, from mid-September to late-November. My Brazilian friend Eliezenai tells me that autumn makes her sad because everything is dying. I tell her it’s not dying; it’s just falling asleep. Elie is dubious, but then again she’s far more enamored of summer’s brash gavotte than I am. Explanations of how fall is the time I feel most alive, most on fire with ideas and possibilities, are wasted on her.

As a horror writer, it’s also our time to shine. October is the Holy Month. It’s the time to read ghost stories by the fireplace with a mug of tea beside you on the table. It’s the time to watch the cycle of Halloween-themed films that have over the years become as familiar as home movies and whose characters feel like family.

In truth the totality of autumn is in me as much as I am in it. My connection to the season is elemental. It has nothing to do with the meme-riddled “pumpkin spice” culture, which has always struck me as a bit arriviste, but I’m OK with feeling that disdain. I suspect there are worse things to be than an autumn snob, particularly when it’s one of your favorite things.

Michael Rowe is the author of the novels Enter, Night; Wild Fell, and October. A former journalist and an award-winning essayist, he is also the author of the nonfiction books Writing Below the Belt, Looking For Brothers, and Other Men’s Sons. He has won the Lambda Literary Award and the Randy Shilts Award for Nonfiction. He has been a finalist for the National Magazine Award, the International Horror Guild Award, the Sunburst Award, and the Shirley Jackson Award. As creator and editor of the anthologies Queer Fear (2000) and Queer Fear 2, he was hailed by Clive Barker as having “changed forever the shape of horror fiction.” He lives in Toronto and welcomes readers at www.michaelrowe.com.

Author Photo by Chuck Webster.

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