Fright -- it's not just for Halloween anymore. To broaden the dark horizons of the season, here's a sampling of scary books about cooking, biology, history, culture and even ghosts.
Monstrous Creations
Sooner or later, most home cooks discover that kitchens can be very scary places: The recipe you've never made before but insist on trying out for guests turns out to be a disaster. The oven thermometer goes on the fritz scorching your delicately assembled souffl. The cake won't emerge from the bundt pan unless you hack it out. Surely , you think, real chefs aren't bedeviled by these problems . Think again. You can't even imagine the hidden kitchen terrors recounted by professionals in Don't Try This at Home: Culinary Catastrophes from the World's Greatest Chefs (Bloomsbury, $24.95), edited by Kimberly Witherspoon and Andrew Friedman. Once you've watched these masters of their universe drop a foie gras terrine into a bowl of warm chocolate sauce, restore a wedding cake accidentally covered with shards of glass, disguise a bag of dirty laundry with crème anglaise to stand in for a mound of fallen meringue -- you'll realize you've probably gotten off easy.
-- Judith Weinraub
Oh, Nevermore!
Crows and ravens have long been birds of omen, augury and death. From Poe to Van Gogh, the birds have inspired ominous art, but these days they are best at mirroring us. In fact, what's really spooky is how much like human beings they are. They dumpster-dive through our cities, knowing that a golden arch on a white bag means something tasty inside, and they thrive in our suburbs, where they use our well-groomed lawns as their private worm farms. Crows even understand our traffic laws: not flying off from roadkill but hopping to the other side of the yellow line when a car approaches. With In the Company of Crows and Ravens (Yale Univ., $30), biologist John Marzluff and artist Tony Angell do a serviceable job of introducing us to these shiny black birds with oversized brains. While their book is marred by an awkward dual authorial voice and a tendency to overstate, it makes up for this with sheer enthusiasm for all things corvid.
-- David Gessner
Which Witch?
Most Americans know about the infamous Salem witch trials of 1692, but a more lethal outbreak of witch hysteria infected England from 1645 to 1647, during the country's devastating Civil War. It all began when Goodwife Rivet got sick and her husband blamed her mysterious affliction on the bewitchment of a one-legged octogenarian named Bess Clarke. Two "witchfinders," Matthew Hopkins and John Stearne, interrogated the widow Clarke, and she proudly confessed to "carnall copulation" with Satan. She also informed them that her pet rabbit was possessed. After seeing Clarke hanged, Hopkins and Sterne then launched a two-year campaign to eradicate witches. Often using torture, they interrogated 300 suspects, more than a hundred of whom were executed (predominantly old women, as in Salem). In Witchfinders: A Seventeenth-Century English Tragedy (Harvard Univ., $29.95), historian Malcolm Gaskill chronicles this chilling tale of hysteria and scapegoating, bolstering his narrative with exhaustive research and meticulous detail.
-- Chuck Leddy
Global Warming
In the 1980s, a graveyard in Stull, Kan., was overrun by visitors, drawn there by a rumor that Satan had impregnated a local woman in the previous century. The stillborn half-human, half-demon reportedly had been laid to rest there. In Go to Hell: A Heated History of the Underworld (Simon Spotlight, $15.95), Chuck Crisafulli and Kyra Thompson explain, "Halloweens began to bring crowds to the cemetery to wait for the devil's visitation" to pay his respects. Police had to give out tickets for trespassing. The Stull anecdote is one of many to be found in a serious book wrapped inside a silly one. In chapters devoted to six fiery questions ("Why Go To Hell?" "Who's In Charge?"), it tells the history of hell: its development through ancient cultures in the Middle East to Christian literature and art, its variations and persistence across cultures and creeds and the superstitions it helped create. The lesson that the authors want us to take away from their survey is this: "Hell is real."
-- Jeremy Lott
Demons Next Door
Americans have always been concerned about keeping out the bogeyman. Before we began using iron and steel to gate our suburbs, we spun spells of legalese. In Bourgeois Nightmares: Suburbia, 1870-1930 (Yale Univ., $30), urban historian Robert M. Fogelson looks at the role restrictive covenants played in the creation of American suburbia. He argues that stringent rules dictating who could live on a property suggest a deep-seated "fear of others . . . fear of change, and fear of the market" on behalf of Americans on their way up the socioeconomic ladder. Conceived originally as insurance for subdividers (it's tough to sell the lots next to a slaughterhouse), restrictive covenants were initially rejected by homeowners as abridgements of their property rights. But as Fogelson observes, racism, classism and xenophobia eventually won out -- and before long, the developers' lengthy lists of proscriptions and prohibitions were being used as effective marketing tools. The "exclusive community" was born.
-- Jeff Turrentine
Ghost Writer
Ever hear the story of the villain who sought prolonged life by eating the still-beating hearts of children -- only to be murdered by their ghosts? Or the young professor, sleeping alone in a secluded inn, who is awakened by something ghoulish sitting in the empty bed beside him? These are the creepy prototypes of the English ghost story, a spine-chilling genre that Cambridge professor of antiquities M.R. James helped invent in the late 19th century. Before James, ghosts were ethereal creatures hovering, for the most part, offstage. But in the first two volumes of his pioneering short fiction, republished this month in Count Magnus and Other Stories (Penguin Classics; paperback, $16), the night is filled with malicious creatures and demonic intentions. "Of course we all know there are no such things," James wrote. But even he admitted to checking the curtains before bed. "Some one might be going to play us a trick, you know, and anyhow it's best to be quite sure."
-- Justin Ewers
