We hear an old song—the soundtrack to a first kiss, a piece from a funeral—and the past is suddenly alive again, as vivid as a spectre at the foot of our bed. It’s not surprising that we describe melodies as haunting. This is the magic of music.
In my novel And He Shall Appear, I wanted to explore this haunting quality of music, its unbreakable connection to memory. As a young man struggling to settle into student life at Cambridge, my narrator is delighted to fall in with Bryn Cavendish: starry college socialite and amateur magician. But their friendship falls apart when he begins to fear that Bryn’s charms are literally supernatural. Music is the narrator’s key to an enchanting, esoteric Cambridge world. But, years after graduation, it also ties him to his past and the friend who dominated it. A friend who may still have a score to settle, despite the fact that he is long dead.
This spooky season, explore novels in which music is used to communicate indescribable emotions and inexplicable experiences.
The Pallbearers Club by Paul Tremblay
In this ‘memoir’, a man recalls an unsettling friendship from his youth. And, from the first page, you know the story won’t be straightforward. Its narrator, Art Barbara, bears a striking resemblance to the author Paul Tremblay himself, not least in their shared love of punk band Hüsker Dü. And the friend Art has written about—a woman named Mercy—has made notes in the margins of this memoir, contesting Art’s view of what happened all those years ago. At the heart of the work is a question: in this toxic friendship, was Mercy an emotional vampire? Or something worse?
This is a story about yearning for lost youth and all the potential that came with it. And, by filling it with Art’s favourite bands—Talking Heads, Ramones, Dead Kennedys, Patti Smith—Tremblay manages to underscore all the fear and dread with an exquisitely painful nostalgia. Eerie, funny, and ultimately extremely moving, this for me is Tremblay at his best.
The Ballad of Black Tom by Victor LaValle
The first part of this novella is told by Charles ‘Tommy’ Tester, a street musician navigating the poverty and prejudice of a jazz age (and occult-tinged) Harlem. After a horrifying incident of police brutality, Tommy throws in his lot with Robert Sudyam: a wealthy white man who has asked Tommy to perform at a party, and who appears to be dabbling in cosmic magic. The second part of the story is told by Detective Malone who, suspicious of Sudyam’s activities, chases him down—and, in doing so, discovers that Tommy Tester has become Black Tom, a frightening figure who now wields monstrous power.
The story is a re-imagining of The Horror at Red Hook: one of H P Lovecraft’s best-known works, and one that sadly showcases his racism and xenophobia. Victor LaValle dedicates the story to Lovecraft ‘with all my conflicted feelings’, masterfully reworking original elements in a way that asks us to wonder what is more monstrous – the dark magic beyond our world or the senseless hatred of those upon it?
The Warm Hands of Ghosts by Katherine Ardern
World War One is underway, and wounded nurse Laura Iven is at home recuperating when she receives word that her brother Freddie has died in combat. However, eerie signs and rumors suggest that he may have been lost to something altogether stranger—and Laura must return to the front line to discover the truth. Flashback to the previous year, and Freddie is trying to escape the battlefield alongside an enemy soldier. Both men are about to discover that the soldiers’ whispers about a mysterious hotel and its fiddle-playing proprietor are more than just superstitious stories.
Alternating between the two apocalyptic timelines, punctuated with quotes from the Book of Revelation, this is an interesting take on the old Devil-as-fiddler folktale. Against the hellscape of Passchendaele, painstakingly depicted, the trope is particularly poignant—unsurprisingly, the fiddler requires something of each soldier he helps, something to help him make his music. And what else can the devil do but fiddle when humanity has made its own hell?
The Piano Room by Clio Velentza
As the son of celebrated musicians, Sandor Esterhazy is expected to enter Hungary’s Academy of Music and become a concert pianist like his father. The problem is, he has neither the inclination nor the talent. Terrified of disappointing his parents, Sandor calls on the devil for help, whose horrifying solution is to present Sandor with someone to take his place at the piano—someone who can’t possibly be human.
This reworking of the Faustian myth asks what it is that makes us who we are (Our dreams? Our ability to make art?) while exploring how we can gain humanity—or lose it altogether. Balancing chills with mystery and romance, Velentza manages to make us feel something for both main characters. For Sandor, pressured into living a life other people want him to live. And for his poor replacement, who loves and appreciates music more than his human counterparts ever could.
A Song for Quiet by Cassandra Khaw
Deacon James is a troubled man. Daily, he navigates the prejudice of the Deep South in the 1940s. And now, a strange and unsettling song circles in his head. When he plays his saxophone, Deacon not only mesmerises his audience – he seems to call up strange and terrifying beings from other worlds. And when he meets a runaway girl who seems to share a similar power, their music becomes impossible to ignore.
It might seem weird to include this on the list, given the parallels with The Ballad of Black Tom. But, while both address the racism within Lovecraft’s work, the experience of reading these novellas couldn’t be more different. Khaw’s prose is known for being extremely ornate, packed with metaphor and linguistic flourishes. And this is interesting when applied to music, particularly the blues: “the music of the ache and the grind.” In the ordinary world, women “gossip in rich contraltos” while “the train shudders on, singing a hymn of disrepair”—so, imagine how baroque things get when the cosmic horror arrives. It might be too rich for some, but Khaw has earned an army of fans with her particular brand of dark poetry.
The Bellwether Revivals by Benjamin Wood
Oscar is a bright young man living in Cambridge and working in a care home. He lives a very different life to the students around him—that is, until he falls in love with Iris Bellwether and is drawn into a social circle governed by her eccentric and musical brother Eden. Inspired by the writings of an obscure German composer, organ scholar Eden asserts that his music can heal ailments as serious as broken bones—even cancer—which his sister believes is a worrying delusion. But what if Eden is right?
Like other campus novels, such as The Secret History, this is a tale of an outsider drawn into a secretive, intellectual circle with disastrous consequences. Its strength is how it explores our need for that treacherous thing, hope—and, perhaps, our desire to trust people like Eden, whose particular class carries powerful and potentially dangerous authority.
A Haunting on the Hill by Elizabeth Hand
In this, the first ever estate-approved follow-up, we revisit Shirley Jackson’s iconic Hill House. (Difficult, then, to imagine this was anything other than the world’s most intimidating book to write.)
Struggling playwright Holly Sherwin is looking for a hideaway where she can develop her new work when she happens upon a crumbling mansion on the edge of town. She’s accompanied by her team: lead actress Amanda, sound engineer Stevie, and Holly’s girlfriend Nisa, who is composing and performing music for the play.
As in the original, there’s an emphasis on dark psychology—on paranoia and distrust, feelings of loneliness. For Holly, this manifests as jealousy of Nisa, whose beautiful voice and songs might well overshadow the play itself. Exploring ideas of creativity, adaptation, influence and ownership, the story invites us to wonder who exactly owns the art we produce and the tales we tell.