All Booked | The Witching Hour

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Hello, fellow bookworms!

It officially feels like autumn has arrived — and with it, the best kind of reading weather! I hope everyone has been staying dry and cozy with these recent rains. This week, our intrepid Mickey Flacks Fund Fellow, Christina McDermott, brings us a collection of spooky graphic novels just in time for Halloween. These might be just the thing for you to curl up and read with a mug of cider and some bite-sized candy bars!

Wishing everyone a safe and spooky Halloween!

Happy reading,

—Tessa, allbooked@independent.com

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When I moved to California, I re-learned the signs of Halloween. While late October in Seattle usually meant thick fog and streetlights that blinked on before 6 p.m., Santa Barbara’s Halloween offered orange-pink dusky twilights that melted into black. As the northern hemisphere tipped toward winter darkness, I leaned into the magic of this season — not just the jack-o-lanterns, candy, and costumes but the increased willingness to entertain ideas of the unexplained.

Folklore from both Ireland and Mexico describes the boundary between the world of the living and the dead thinning this time of year. Here are three graphic novels that embrace that liminality, that offer the possibility that maybe what we’re seeing is not everything that’s there.

A warning: These books have pictures, but they aren’t for kids. Harrow County contains gore and violence. Witchcraft contains stylized nudity, artistic depictions of sex, and references to rape, violence against Indigenous people, and child abuse. When I Arrived at the Castle includes gore and nudity.

Harrow County: Omnibus One by Cullen Bunn; art and lettering by Tyler Crook, Carla Speed McNeil, Hannah Lavender, Jenn Manley Lee 

If you’ve ever been in the woods on a dark night and felt like something was watching you, read Harrow County. The series’ first omnibus begins on a dark and rainy night (classic) as the people of the fictional Harrow County “put the witch to death” with rope and fire. Eighteen years later, Emmy Crawford, who grew up helping her father run their small farm, must flee those same townsfolk, who are convinced she is the reincarnation of that witch. From there, Cullen Bunn spins a saga with magic, Southern Gothic “haints,” demons, gods, and the ever-present question: Do our origins define us? Tyler Crook’s watercolor artwork creates delicate, pastoral scenes interspersed with graphic, vibrant action, tugging you into a tiny 1930s town where the weird and wicked is just beyond your doorstep.

Witchcraft by Sole Otero

Sole Otero’s Witchcraft begins with three strange women and a goat bound for Buenos Aires in 1768. The women are permitted to leave the ship first, to the consternation of a noble woman aboard. She tells her small son to go play while she argues with the sailors over this strange order (surely nobility should precede these nobodies. Mysteriously, the child disappears.

Over the course of the next several hundred pages, Otero weaves a non-linear story of people affected by these strange women, with their connections, land, and mysterious powers. The novel explores how patriarchy restricts women, the colonization of Indigenous people in what is today Argentina and gives us readers three characters who are neither fully moral nor corrupt. Otero’s art style is captivating: stylized characters weave between panels with fine houses, forests, and crowded city streets. Different sections of the book lend themselves to different color pallets. It’s like walking through an artist’s dream.

When I Arrived at the Castle by EM Carroll 

In this short graphic novel, EM Carroll invites us into the seductive, destructive world of a vampire countess. 

“She peeled the cloak away from my damp skin like she was dividing dead flesh from the living,” our protagonist tells us. “Her nails glittered. The backs of ten scuttling beetles.” 

So begins an encounter that’s part fairytail, part sapphic erotic horror, part puzzle. Carroll’s ink drawings spread across the page — black, white, gray, and rich red — swept me up in the movement of the story. 

By the end (this book is only about 70 pages and I finished it in one sitting), I felt I had watched (not read, watched) a metamorphosis on the page. There’s delight in the roles of predator and prey being so poorly defined. 

What fun, to not know how the story will end. 

—Christina McDermot

FROM OUR PAGES

Here is some of our book-related coverage from the last two weeks! Read all this and more at Independent.com.

“Off Register Hosts Third Annual Art Book and Print Fair” by Taylor Cusimano

“Rhonda Byrne Celebrates 20th Anniversary of The Secret Publication with Two New Books and a Special Event” by Cheryl Crabtree

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UPCOMING BOOK EVENTS

Below, you will find a few bookish events coming up in Santa Barbara. If you are hosting a bookish event in Santa Barbara, be sure to submit the event to our online events calendar.

Julia C. Morse: Damage Control: Lies, Evasions, and the Cost of Breaking International Law
Tuesday, October 27, 4 p.m. | UCSB Library,  Pacific Views Room

Junk Journaling Workshop
Tuesday, October 27, 6 p.m. | Art from Scrap, EE Makerspace

Godmothers Gather: Amy Smilovic, Almost Reckless: A Creative and Pragmatic Approach to Taking Risks
Tuesday, October 27, 6 p.m. | Godmothers

Author Talk: Sophie Osborn, Wild Work: Adventures of Women Field Biologists
Tuesday, October 27, 7 p.m. | Santa Barbara Museum of Natural History

Godmothers Gather: Julianna Glasse, This Is What Happens When Women Read
Wednesday, October 28, 6 p.m. | Godmothers

Book Signing:  Lauren Greenfield, Queen of Versailles: An American Allegory
Thursday, October 29, 2 p.m. | Hotel El Roblar, Ojai

Cookbook Release Celebration: Anna Vocino, Eat Happy, Sip Happy
Thursday, October 29, 6 p.m. | The Barn at Seagrape, Santa Ynez

Godmothers Gather: The Enduring Classics Book Club: Dracula
Friday, October 30, 5 p.m. | Godmothers

Storytime at the Sea Center
Saturday, October 31, 10:30 a.m. | S.B. Museum of Natural History Sea Center

Sacred Garden Quarterly Book Club: Soul Centered by Sarah McLean
Sunday, November 1, 2:30 p.m. | Flow Yoga & Wellness

Chaucer’s Author Talk & Signing: Miriam Pawel, California Dreams
Sunday, November  1, 4 p.m. | Chaucer’s Books

Godmothers Gather: Sophia Bush, And I Will Tell You Mine: Notes from a Life in Progress
Sunday, November 1, 6 p.m. | Godmothers

Author Talk and Signing: SBCC Creative Writing Presents Dr. Victor Rios
Monday, November 2, 3 p.m. | SBCC East Cliff Campus

Godmothers Gather: Eitan Yardeni, The Power of Kabbalah
Monday, November 2, 6 p.m. | Godmothers

Fiction Book Club: Sing, unburied, Sing by Jesmyn Ward
Tuesday, November 3, 5:30 p.m. | Central Library

Author Talk: Betsy J. Green, Way Back When: Santa Barbara in 1926
Wednesday, November 4, 5:30 p.m. | Santa Barbara Historical Museum

Godmothers Gather: Gray Malin, Snow
Thursday, November 5, 6 p.m. | Godmothers

Godmothers Gather: Dr Joe Dispenza, Becoming Supernatural: How Common People Are Doing the Uncommon
Friday, November 6, 6 p.m. | Godmothers

SBMAL Library Open House
Saturday, November 7, 9:30 a.m. | Santa Barbara Mission Archive-Library

Storytime at the Sea Center
Saturday, November 7, 10:30 a.m. | S.B. Museum of Natural History Sea Center

Author Talk & Book Signing:  Brian Gaffney, School of Hard Knucks: My Three Sons and Baseball’s Wildest Pitch
Saturday, November 7, 3 p.m. | Tecolote Book Shop

Raíces y Sueños Bilingual Storytime
Sunday, November 8, 11 a.m. | SBMA, Art Learning Lab

Parallel Stories: Karen Tei Yamashita, Questions 27 & 28
Sunday, November 8, 2 p.m. | Santa Barbara Museum of Art

Chaucer’s Author Talk: DJ Palladino, Spake as a Child
Monday, November  9, 6 p.m. | Chaucer’s Books

Godmothers Gather: JJ Martin, Table Energy: Entertaining With Italian Spirit
Monday, November 9, 6 p.m. | Godmothers

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S.B. SPOTLIGHT

We at the Independent get many books sent to us by area authors, sometimes too many! It’s practically impossible for us to read and review them all, but just because we are busy bees does not mean that they aren’t worth the attention. In an attempt to not completely drop the ball, we have compiled a list of books here that are either written by a Santa Barbara author, feature someone in our community, or have another tie to Santa Barbara. I urge you to look through this list. Perhaps you will find your new favorite read!

The following are the most recent titles that have been sent to us.

Echoes of the Rain: Battles and Blessings: A Tour of Duty in Vietnam by Keith M. Nightingale

Nature’s Ally: How the Next Generation of Environmental Warriors Can Save Our Overheating Planet by Robert H. Sulnick

If you are a local author and would like us to feature your book in this section, please email allbooked@independent.com with the subject line “S.B. Spotlight.”

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Book Reviews Courtesy of CALIFORNIA REVIEW OF BOOKS*

Thanks to the generous contributions of David Starkey, Brian Tanguay and their team of reviewers at California Review of Books, we are able to provide a steady stream of book reviews via our content partnership. Recent reviews at Independent.com include: 

Mothsblood by Lynn D. Jung; review by Brian Tanguay

On Un/Certainty: The Uses of Doubt in Dangerous Times by Natasha Lennard; review by Brian Tanguay

*At the present time, all of the Independent’s book reviews are provided in collaboration with California Review of Books (calirb.com).