I’m baaaack
Your favorite horror/recovery newsletter has returned.
Dearest readers, I am so glad to be publishing this newsletter again. My summer hiatus ended up being longer than planned, so I greatly appreciate your patience. While I’ve been away, I celebrated by 11th year sober and I’ve continued my research on the parallels of recovery and the horror genre and have lots of great stuff to share in the coming posts.
Hello and welcome to my new subscribers! Here at Back From the Dead, I like to provide quarterly reviews of books, film, music, and recovery resources that I’ve found to be cool/interesting/helpful. So let’s dive in.
Books
Damnable Tales: A Folk Horror Anthology, Richard Wells
I picked this up on vacation in the Adirondack mountains back in August. This collection of stories spans work by well-known writers like M.R. James and Algernon Blackwood to more obscure (and bonkers) tales from Ireland and the UK. Shirley Jackson’s The Summer People makes an appearance in this anthology, and reading it again while up in a small NY mountain town right before Labor Day added an extra layer of creepiness.
Do you want to learn more about the weird, wonderful world of folk horror?
put together a great list of folk horror recommendations that’s chock full of excellent books.
The Bus on Thursday by Shirley Barrett
This book wins mega points for being a horror novel that made me laugh out loud. Set in Australia, it follows a breast cancer survivor who is facing her demons. Literal demons. The blurb on the jacket says it’s for “fans of Helen Fielding and Stephen King.” I know that books have to do that now for marketing purposes, but you should just go ahead and ignore this comparison. Shirley Barrett’s voice is totally unique and not remotely like Bridget Jones’ Diarrhea and as much as I love Mr. King, he never wrote a female protagonist this real. I looked Barrett up (I was kind of thinking of writing her a letter…) and was deeply saddened to find out that she had passed away after a long illness. I did learn that she’s a filmmaker as well as a writer, so I am going to track down her movies.
A House With Good Bones, T. Kingfisher
Speaking of real female protagonists, T. Kingfisher’s women are just so damn relatable. A House With Good Bones combines the haunted house trope with ‘millennial coming back home and facing family dysfunction’ trope and adds lots and lots and lots of bugs. It’s also fun to read Kingfisher’s books because they are so culturally specific to the Carolinas. I also learned a lot about vultures from this novel and they are pretty cool animals.
Natural Beauty, Ling Ling Huang
I read this book in one night, and I definitely should have been sleeping. Yes, I have insomnia, but this novel is also really good. It’s about a concert pianist who starts working for a company that sells cutting-edge beauty products. As she gets more involved with the company culture, the “beauty” treatments become more questionable and extreme. Huang, the author, is a concert violinist in real life and you can tell she’s bringing her real-life musical experience to the page.
Film
I finally joined Letterboxd so I can keep track of the movies I watch. If you’re on there, let’s be friends!
Terror you won’t want to remember—in a film you won’t be able to forget.
A woman comes back to a seaside town looking for her missing father. Unfortunately, the town seems to be possessed by some sort of undead cult.
Because of the time period and the zombies, this movie draws parallels to George Romero’s Dead trilogy, but tonally, stylistically, and vibe-wise, it’s very different. I watch a lot of giallos and ridiculous 70s movies, so I went into this thinking I was in for a campy, fun ride and was genuinely blown away by how creepy it ended up being. It’s worth a watch for the art direction and soundtrack alone, but the performances are great and Marianna Hill really sinks her teeth into the lead role. In a truly weird turn, the writer and director behind this film also made Howard the Duck, so make what you will of that.
Music
I found out about
from Giuseppe Savoni’s meticulously curated Instagram account. Then I discovered they have an entire newsletter dedicated to Italian music from the 70s and 80s! Between what they’re posting on these channels and the jams their Bandcamp page, I’ve got a whole bunch of new toe-tapping tracks thanks to these bellissimi bambini.Recovery
No Bad Parts: Healing Trauma and Restoring Wholeness with the Internal Family Systems Model, Richard C. Schwartz, PhD
I found out about the Internal Family Systems (IFS) model from a therapist I worked with for many years. IFS is especially helpful for people who deal with addiction or trauma (or both, as these are often a package deal) because of its non-judgmental approach to thoughts and feelings. No Bad Parts offers an in-depth explanation of the theories behind IFS and how you can use them to better understand your emotions and behavior.
Up until I found a good trauma-informed therapist, much of my experience with counseling had been about FIXING YOURSELF and GETTING BETTER because YOU ARE BRINGING SHAME TO YOUR FAMILY and YOU NEED TO BE NORMAL SO YOU CAN GET A JOB. And so much of addiction treatment was just plain punitive. IFS is more about tuning in to the parts of yourself that are trying to tell you something, often because they are in pain. I know this sounds a little woo, but I assure you that my tolerance for woo is extremely low. IFS gets into listening to very young parts of yourself that are frozen in time, but it’s nothing like a Pixar movie. I found it to be particularly helpful for understanding why I would suddenly feel like I was going to flip out for (seemingly) no reason. If you’re interested in learning more about IFS, there are a lot of videos by Dr. Schwartz on their website.
Live show
Attn Hudson Valley locals: I will be performing at the 2024 O+ Festival in Kingston on October 13th as part of their WO+rd literary salon. WO+RD includes interactive readings celebrating diverse voices across genres including poetry, fiction, nonfiction, comedy, spoken word, prose, plays, and everything in between. I’ll be doing some standup comedy on 4pm on 10/13, but the festival lineup is chock full of amazing music and art, and there are even wellness workshops you can attend from somatic movement, breath work, parenting, to Narcan training.