The short list below probably looks like I didn't read much in September. Not true! I started reading IT by Stephen King at the end of August or so, which took up quite a bit of my reading time in September. Notice that I didn't finish IT, though. It's a massive book. I finally had to put it down about halfway through and read something else. I'll come back to it soon, but wow. I still have around 650-700 pages left. Whew!

I'm making a small effort to mix classic stories in with the more modern stuff across a variety of genres. Just because a story is old doesn't mean it's bad or outdated.

Ghost Story by Peter Straub is considered a classic Horror story, and when I dove into it, it was easy to see why. Straub's masterpiece draws the reader in from the get-go, but it's not a ghost story. It's the tale of a group of men who meet regularly to share stories from their past, driven by the one story they have in common.

I can't share what that commonality is without spoiling Ghost Story's suspense. Suffice it to say that it's a well-written tale of a small town spiraling into a misery created by a vengeful entity and entirely worth the time needed to read it.

Horrorstor by Grady Hendrix can be summed up succinctly: Horror in a big box retail store. How could anyone who's worked retail resist that?

The story begins when Basil, a deputy store manager, recruits Amy and another floor partner to stay in the store overnight in the hopes of spotting those responsible for damage done to the store when it's closed. What follows is a gruesomely creepy, and often gory, nightmarish ride.

Horrostor is a quick, compelling read. I stayed up all night to finish it, so that should tell you something. And it ends on an upbeat note, which I liked. I recommend reading the paperback edition, as it's laid out like a catalog with product advertisements and whatnot.

I've been trying to get my hands on a Stephen Graham Jones novel since reading "The Night Cyclist" on Tor.com. When my local public library moved to a state-wide lending system, I jumped at the chance to read more of his stories.

Unfortunately, few libraries house this brilliant writer's works in print form within their collections, so I wound up requesting one of Jones's novellas.

Mapping the Interior is told from the perspective of a twelve-year-old "Indian" boy living with his mother and a younger brother who suffers from seizures. At first, it seems like a ghost story, but in reality there's something much deeper going on.

Two things kept me from fully enjoying this disturbing tale. The first was the experimental language, which rendered the story awkward and not at all like the speech patterns of a twelve-year-old kid. Which is what I expected when I picked the story up, so it was a bit jarring.

The second was the repeated assertions by the narrator that only "Indians" go through the things he was experiencing: the grinding poverty, the bullying, the otherness of being an outcast. Granted, some of that did come from his heritage, but not all of it, not even the majority of it. I went with it mostly because at that age, a myopic viewpoint is the norm; kids have a hard time thinking outside their own experiences.

However, I see that kind of myopia being used to foster a lack of understanding by the intersectionality slash identity politics crowd, as if it's impossible to empathize with someone's situation due to racial, gender, or sexuality differences.

Yet we all experience the sorts of problems described in Mapping the Interior. Ok, probably not the ghost-monster part, but the other stuff, the family dysfunction, the longing for a deceased relative, and so on. If you can't identify or find some commanility with the young narrator, you're not human. Period, the end.

All that said, I did enjoy Mapping the Interior and I highly recommend it.

That's it for my reading in September. I didn't even touch non-fiction. Highly unusual! But I was horribly busy prepping for two releases and developing further stories, so there's that. Hopefully, October will shape up to be a better reading month, but I have my doubts. I still have the rest of IT to read and that's going to take a while.