Further Reading: Are-They-Haunted Houses
It's impossible to talk about haunted houses without mentioning Shirley Jackson's 1959 classic, The Haunting of Hill House. The terror of Jackson's story builds slowly, then suddenly, as four people in search of proof of the supernatural find themselves terrified by the house they are staying in. The beauty of Jackson's story--and what makes it so utterly creepy--is the vagueness: Are these people living in a truly haunted house, or are they haunted by their own fear? 
This same subtle build, stacked with questions and unknowns, can be found again and again in fiction, with regal old mansions sagging beneath the weight of their painful histories. John Boyne's This House Is Haunted plays with classic themes from Victorian ghost stories, as a governess is called to work in an old mansion in the English countryside, only to find herself dogged by a vicious ghost upon her arrival. In Newport, author Jill Morrow imbues the story of a gold-digging second wife with an unexpected twist: the fiancé in question, the very wealthy Bennett Chapman, insists that he's been instructed to marry this much younger woman by the ghost of his late wife. Chapman's family and closest advisers converge on the Chapman estate in Newport, R.I., to a séance with the first Mrs. Chapman, only to find the mansion holds as many secrets as it does answers.
The secrets in The Loney and The House Between Tides are literally buried within the structures of the old mansions. In The Loney, by Andrew Michael Hurley, the bones of an infant are found concealed in the walls of the Lancashire coastline house to which a family goes each year. In Sarah Maine's The House Between Tides, the bones are in the foundation of Muirlan, a turn-of-the-century mansion in Scotland's Outer Hebrides. Both novels move backward and forward through time to piece together two very different, but perfectly eerie, tales of the long shadows the past casts over the present. --Kerry McHugh, blogger at Entomology of a Bookworm
In 1994, Bob Smith became the first out gay stand-up comedian to perform on the Tonight Show and star in his own HBO special. His first book, Openly Bob, beat out David Sedaris's Naked to win the Lambda Literary Award for humor in 1998. When he was diagnosed with ALS in 2007, his best friend and fellow comedian Eddie Sarfaty said Smith's reaction was, "Lou Gehrig's disease? I don't even like baseball!" Smith's new essay collection, Treehab: Tales from My Natural Wild Life (reviewed below), celebrates his love of nature, his two children, and his life before and after what he calls his "you're-gonna-die-agnosis." Smith lives in New York City with his partner, Michael Zam (who wrote the book for the award-winning musical adaptation of Dan Savage's adoption memoir The Kid). 
I loved the stories you tell about comedians having professional boundaries but not personal ones with each other, and some of the hilarious--and wildly inappropriate--things you've said to each other. One of my favorites in Treehab is when your friend and fellow comic Judy Gold told you her cat had cancer and your response was, "Was she a smoker?" What's the most outrageous thing you said or was said to you?
Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children by Ransom Riggs, his debut novel and a New York Times bestseller, began as a proposed picture book. Riggs, a collector of old photographs by amateur photographers, was convinced by editors at Quirk Books to expand his concept into a young adult novel. The result, a mix of those photographs and a darkly whimsical story, was published in 2011. It follows 16-year-old Jacob Portman, who, after his grandfather's strange death, travels to a seemingly deserted orphanage in Wales. Eventually he discovers an orphanage hidden in a time loop, a place run by Alma LeFay Peregrine for children with unusual powers, like invisibility, super strength, and far more peculiar gifts. It turns out Jacob also has a weird ability, one that might make all the difference in a struggle against a harrowing enemy.
