Little Ghosts Bookstore and Café Has a Fright for Every Taste
TORONTO — Autumn is in the air once again. Jack-o’-lanterns flicker on porches and skeletons cavort in window displays. What better way to celebrate the season than with a good horror book? Little Ghosts Bookstore and Café in Trinity Bellwoods is the perfect place to find the right scary book by a local author, or even a story set in Toronto. The friendly staff can point you to books from a diverse group of writers with something for just about every taste.
Heard the story about the Airbnb that eats your dreams? Gemma Files delivers fifteen frightful tales with her collection In that Endlessness, Our End, winner of the 2021 Bram Stoker Award for superior achievement in a fiction collection. Her novel Experimental Film, which won the Shirley Jackson Award, follows a Toronto film teacher who discovers a lost movie from the early days of Canadian cinema that summons a demonic entity.
If plagues or crazed people running amuck are your thing, you might enjoy any of three books by Nick Cutter (pen name for Craig Davidson). Little Heaven features a clandestine, backwoods religious cult. The Deep tells about a strange plague decimating humanity. In The Troop, a scoutmaster and his troop encounter the human carrier of a bioengineered nightmare. Bestselling Toronto author Andrew Pyper supplies a riveting psychological thriller with The Homecoming, about how the people you’ve known your whole life can suddenly become strangers. For a fast-paced, zombie-esque story, check out Infested by Windsor author C.M. Forest.
In David Demchuk’s Red X, gay men are disappearing from Toronto’s gay village. Could some ancient, monstrous evil be to blame? In Jon O’Bergh’s Shockadelica, a drag queen and his fashion-obsessed female friend investigate their haunted Cabbagetown apartment building with the help of their quirky neighbours and uncover an evil force that threatens them all. Queer, autistic writer Nic Brewer delivers a body horror blockbuster in her debut novel Suture, about three artists who cut themselves open to make their art.
Wizards in a future dystopian North America set the pace in Jason Krawczyk’s An Earth that Knows Magic. Body horror and Gothic atmosphere permeate Naben Ruthnum’s Helpmeet. For a story rooted in folktales about a supernatural being from the sea, try Lure by Tim McGregor. The bittersweet coming-of-age tale The Saturday Night Ghost Club, by Craig Davidson, takes place in Niagara Falls and poignantly examines the haunting mutability of memory and storytelling.
For film buffs, Experimental Film is not your only option. The Death Scene Artist by Andrew Wilmot intersperses blog entries with movie script excerpts to tell a story about body dysmorphia and dangerous desires. If you enjoy reading about horror cinema, pick up Nightmare Fuel: The Science of Horror Films by Nina Nesseth, staff scientist at Science North in Sudbury.
Of course, Little Ghosts offers more than just horror books by homegrown authors. You can sip a latte while reading the latest novel by Gabino Iglesias or a collection of classic ghost stories by Shirley Jackson. Their motto says it all: A good story will haunt you.
Little Ghosts Bookstore and Café930 Dundas Street WestToronto, Ontario M6J1W3(647) 666-7675www.littleghostsbooks.com
