For this year's Wilmette Reads, we chose to spotlight two titles, a fiction and a nonfiction book: Entangled Life and Ghost Music. Entangled Life is a nonfiction book about the fascinatingly weird and varied world of fungi and how essential it is to supporting life on Earth, including humans. Ghost Music is a family drama with hints of the surreal, about a Chinese woman's relationship with her estranged mother-in-law, which changes as they begin to receive packages from a mysterious benefactor filled with mushrooms that they cook and eat together.
You can read one or both of these titles to participate in Wilmette Reads, but you can also read any other books of your choosing. Did you know, for example, that there are plenty of horror novels that also rely on fungi to create their scares? Here are some of my favorites below.
Undead Girl Gang by Lily Anderson
Meet teenage Wiccan Mila Flores, who truly could not care less what you think about her Doc Martens, her attitude, or her weight because she knows that, no matter what, her BFF Riley is right by her side. So when Riley and Fairmont Academy mean girls, June Phelan-Park and Dayton Nesseth, die under suspicious circumstances, Mila refuses to believe everyone's explanation that her BFF was involved in a suicide pact. Instead, armed with a tube of lip gloss and an ancient grimoire, Mila does the unthinkable to uncover the truth: she brings the girls back to life.
The Girl With All the Gifts by M.R. Carey
Not every gift is a blessing. Every morning, Melanie waits in her cell to be collected for class. When they come for her, Sergeant Parks keeps his gun pointing at her while two of his people strap her into the wheelchair. She thinks they don't like her. She jokes that she won't bite. But they don't laugh. Melanie is a very special girl. Emotionally charged and gripping from beginning to end, the girl with all the gifts is the most powerful and affecting thriller you will read this year.
What We Harvest by Ann Fraistat
The farms of Hollow's End were blessed with miracle crops, especially the shimmering, iridescent wheat of Wren's family farm, but then the quicksilver blight came, and the blight destroys everything: crops turned to silver sludge, animals sickened and blinded, even people; Wren believes she is responsible, and desperate to save Hollow's End she turns to her ex-boyfriend--but they find that there is a lot they do not know about their town and its miracle crops, and that their ancestors have a lot to answer for.
Wilder Girls by Rory Powers
It's been eighteen months since the Raxter School for Girls was put under quarantine. Since the Tox hit and pulled Hetty's life out from under her. It started slow. First the teachers died one by one. Then it began to infect the students, turning their bodies strange and foreign. Now, cut off from the rest of the world and left to fend for themselves on their island home, the girls don't dare wander outside the school's fence, where the Tox has made the woods wild and dangerous. But when Byatt goes missing, Hetty will do anything to find her, even if it means breaking quarantine and braving the horrors that lie beyond the fence.
House of Hollow by Krystal Sutherland
Seventeen-year-old Iris Hollow has always been strange. Something happened to her and her two older sisters when they were children, something they can’t quite remember but that left each of them with an identical half-moon scar at the base of their throats. Iris has spent most of her teenage years trying to avoid the weirdness that sticks to her like tar. But when her eldest sister, Grey, goes missing under suspicious circumstances, Iris learns just how weird her life can get.
Bonus: here are two adult titles for you older high school readers who are looking for more adult themes and scares.
Mexican Gothic by Silvia Moreno-Garcia
After receiving a frantic letter from her newlywed cousin, Noemí Taboada heads to High Place, a distant house in the Mexican countryside. Noemí is an unlikely rescuer: She's a glamorous debutante, and her chic gowns and perfect red lipstick are more suited for cocktail parties than amateur sleuthing. But she's also tough and smart, with an indomitable will, and she is not afraid. Her only ally in this inhospitable abode is the family's youngest son. Shy and gentle, he seems to want to help Noemí, but might also be hiding dark knowledge of his family's past. For there are many secrets behind the walls of High Place. The family's once colossal wealth and faded mining empire kept them from prying eyes, but as Noemí digs deeper she unearths stories of violence and madness.
What Moves the Dead by T. Kingfisher
When Alex Easton, a retired soldier, receives word that their childhood friend Madeline Usher is dying, they race to the ancestral home of the Ushers in the remote countryside of Ruritania. What they find there is a nightmare of fungal growths and possessed wildlife, surrounding a dark, pulsing lake. Madeline sleepwalks and speaks in strange voices at night, and her brother, Roderick, is consumed by a mysterious malady of the nerves. Aided by a redoubtable British mycologist and a baffled American doctor, Alex must unravel the secret of the House of Usher before it consumes them all.