The Ghost Writer

(The book.) 

I picked up this red-faced beauty at an airport on my way home last winter. I had brought a few other novels with me, but I fell in love with this one, unsuspectingly, almost immediately upon opening. 

Often, horror novels, a la my tried-and-true Stephen King, feel like a brutal one-night stand (Pet Sematary), or even sometimes a long-distance relationship that drags you through for three years and ends in inevitable heartbreak (The Stand — incidentally, my favorite book of all time). 

Rosemary’s Baby is the tender lover you meet on vacation who you think about in bed with your husband 20 years later. It’s love at first sight, it’s instant, head-over-heels love. I love — I LOVE — this book. Here’s why. 

I am, at my core, an aesthetic girl. I might not have the patience for it on the screen, but in books, the construction and the feel of the book, the painstaking slowness, are instrumental. I could see the soft lighting of Rosemary’s apartment. I could run my hand along her yellow striped wallpaper. I could taste the cocktails she made for her dinner guests. And I could smell the tannis root hanging from the filigree necklace around her neck. Every detail was so painstakingly and stunningly constructed that I felt as though I lived in that apartment with her, experienced the gaslighting of my arch nemesis, Guy, right alongside her, and was infuriated — genuinely infuriated — when she was placating. 

It’s as infuriating as it is aesthetically appealing, though. It broke my heart. When things went south, I became scared — nay, protective — over Rosemary, fearful in a way that made her human. I mourned the death of Hutch. I detested and feared Minnie and Roman. It’s (perhaps obviously) as much a story about the draining duty of being a woman, a mother, a wife, as it is about a woman pregnant with the child of Satan.  

It’s a spooky book, yes, but it’s also warm in all the ways a fall/winter book should be — warm in a way I haven’t yet found with any other book. 

Bring it home for the holidays, enjoy it in your warmest sweater with your most comforting cup of tea — or your most comforting glass of wine — in front of a warm fire. Fall in love with me