Questions about Book Riot? We’re turning 15 next month, and you’re invited to the party. Ask us anything, reflect on the biggest literary controversies of the last decade-and-a-half, and celebrate the best of the bookish internet.
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KIDS’ LIT
New online game show hosted by Kwame Alexander
Story Showdown is the new online game show co-hosted and developed by award-winning and bestselling poet and author of children’s books, Kwame Alexander.
The show is the result of a partnership between literary nonprofitsFirst Book and One Word at a Time, which was founded by Alexander. Its three episodes will be available on the First Book Community Platform, a space dedicated to providing programming for educators serving under-resourced communities. There is free guest access for non-members.
Each 30-minute episode will feature:
Renowned children’s book authors competing in creative and fun challenges
Prizes for First Book members
A look at the people behind our favorite kids’ books
The show is meant to give kids from under-resourced communities more access to art and literature.
The first episode will air today, September 22, from 1:00-1:30 pm EST!
The world is bleak, but the vibe is ultimately hopeful in Cormac McCarthy’s Pulitzer-winning post-apocalyptic novelThe Road, which came out 20 years ago this week.
The story about a father and son struggling to survive years after an unspecified catastrophe wiped out most of humanity and left the earth covered in ashes was inspired by a moment McCarthy shared with his own son, who was just six at the time of the book’s release.
The book’s reputation and McCarthy’s own complicated personal life belie a tale that, though violent at times, is punctuated with moments of great beauty and intense tenderness.
Singular and memorable, The Road ranked #13 on the New York Times‘s list of the best books of the 21st century so far.
It also led to McCarthy’s first ever television interview when Oprah selected it for her book club in 2007.
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LISTS
Some of the best Gothic romances
I’ve spoken at length about my love of the gothic genre, whichever variant it comes in. Gothic horror? I’m in. Gothic romance? Shut up and take my money. Gothic mysteries? Well, why didn’t you just say so?
Mystery plots hit differently when placed against the backdrop of a Victorian manor or a crumbling abbey. The stakes are twice as high.
The Library Thief by Kuchenga Shenjé: After her father throws her out, Florence maneuvers her way into Rose Hall, where she’s meant to restore the old books in the library. The old tomes hold her interest… as do the rumors about Lord Francis Belfield’s late wife. But when the library is broken into, apparently with the sole purpose of burning the wife in question’s diary, Florence must grapple with questions that might put her own life at risk.
Rebecca by Daphne Du Maurier: Rebecca famously follows an unnamed narrator as she tries to find her place at her new home, no easy feat when traces of her husband’s first wife are everywhere. Soon, she’s as obsessed with the late Rebecca de Winter as her husband Maxim is. Mainly, she needs to answer the most pressing question: who was Rebecca?
Japanese Gothicby Kylie Lee Baker: Half horror, half mystery, all Gothic: exactly my kind of book. After killing his college roommate, Lee flees to Japan, where he seeks refuge in his father’s home. Something is wrong with the house, though… and the young woman with the sword who appears in the yard upon nightfall is only one of the reasons why.
Deena Helm is the author of Our Cut of Salt, out today from Tor Nightfire. Below, she discusses the relationship between haunted house stories and haunted history.
Haunted houses are alluring, in part, because we want to know why. It’s a terrifying concept, to live your life in one place for so long, to make and build a home, only for it to become murderous, or ghostly, or make strange noises in the night. We want to uncover its trauma. A terrible thing had to have happened in the past — an excruciating reason — for the house to bring its history into the present.
The past, in this way, becomes alive. There is not only a haunted entity within four walls, but there is a recurring history that is itself haunted. In Our Cut of Salt — my novel about a haunted house in Palestine – the lived history is an integral piece of the recurring horrors. What do houses, older than occupations and wars themselves, witness? What must they feel in their stones and rafters, and how does it manifest? There aren’t just ghosts in the walls — they exist in memory, too.
As we build our lives and ourselves in our homes, these places of love can become bitter in witness to real-life horrors. We each carry the trauma of the past with us, whether we realize it or not. There is pain in breathing life into the past. These events are pulled forward, again and again, into the reliving; there is an ache in the meeting of past and present. The memories may be from long ago, but the wounds are real now. The hauntings are alive in the past and the present — each a continuation of the other.
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HAPPY BIRTHDAY
Nick Cave, born September 22, 1957
Did you know? Cave uses a typewriter to write because he doesn’t want to be able to delete work he is initially unhappy with too easily.
Questions about Book Riot? We’re turning 15 next month, and you’re invited to the party. 
The winner of the 2026 Booker Prize will be announced November 9 and will take home £50,000 (about $67,000).
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