Reflection: My Life as a Constant Reader with an Uncanny Soul

By Sadie Hartmann

Sadie Hartmann runs the popular Instagram account @mother.horror. She is also co-Owner of Night Worms, a monthly subscription service featuring horror books and themed extras, and has won a Bram Stoker Award® for her book, 101 Horror Books to Read Before You’re Murdered (2023). Her second book, Mother Horror’s Ultimate Reading Guide to Dark and Disturbing Fiction by Women, came out in 2025. She is @sadiehartmannmotherhorror on Substack.

I was thirteen when I pulled my mother’s copy of Stephen King’s Salem’s Lot off the shelf and squirreled it away in  my bedroom to see what a scary book would feel like. Reading it late at night felt dangerous and exciting. Some nights, I slipped out of bed and crept across the hall where my two younger sisters slept so I could fall asleep to the soothing, reassuring sounds of their breathing.

It was the late ’80s, and most of what my mom had on her shelves was Anne Rice and Stephen King, along with a few Peter Staub books.

Noticing my new addiction to horror, we started making regular trips to the library, and I feasted on the offerings–Bram Stoker’s Dracula, Edgar Allan Poe stories and poems, Frankenstein by Mary Shelley and a book I discovered called The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson–a remarkably different book than my steady diet of King’s style of storytelling. 

By this time, I was a freshman in high school. Nothing supernatural or paranormal has happened to me, but I felt like I was in a story where the rules kept changing, and I was always one step behind everyone else. I was in a toxic, four-way female friend group that left me emotionally exhausted, starting each day with anxiety, and managing psychological warfare during school hours. I came home with a heavy schedule of homework and not nearly enough mental capacity to do it. But I had my books. My horror books.

I spent the hours leading up to dinner curled up in my bedroom with a good book, and then had  a yummy meal with the family where we decompressed from the day. It was restorative enough to complete a few hours of homework before bed. Some nights I stayed up late watching The X-Files or Unsolved Mysteries with my parents, and was in bed by ten so I could have at least an hour of reading before sleep. I clearly remember the night I started reading The Haunting of Hill House because it was a complete game-changer. The opening paragraph blew my mind.

No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality; even larks and katydids are supposed, by some, to dream. Hill House, not sane, stood by itself against its hills, holding darkness within; it had stood so for eighty years and might stand for eighty more. Within, walls continued upright, bricks met neatly, floors were firm, and doors were sensibly shut; silence lay steadily against the wood and stone of Hill House, and whatever walked there, walked alone.

I sat up in bed.

Who is this narrator who knows Hill House so intimately? 

How can a house be “not sane”? Such a remarkable introduction to a horror tale; I’ve never since read its equal. It wasn’t just scary; it was wholly and completely disorienting with its invasion into normal, everyday life.

Later, in chapter 2, Eleanor Vance is introduced to us. She’s a thirty-two-year-old woman, and the narrator tells the reader straight away that she hates her whole immediate family–even her five-year-old niece–and she has no friends.

If there is a more enchanting way to capture a teenage girl’s attention, I’d like to hear it. Salem’s Lot starts with a father and son on some kind of road trip. The Haunting of Hill House starts with a villainous house, a woman with no friends who hates her family–an offer nobody–least of all a teenage girl–could ever refuse.

And yet, even after falling in love with my first Shirley Jackson book, it would be decades before I felt compelled to read more. It’s fascinating to me that Stephen King’s influence on me was so all-encompassing and pervasive–not even my transformative experience with Hill House was truly able to penetrate through the layers upon layers of learned preferences. I still say it was transformative because of the way it burrowed into my reader’s heart a seed, but its germination would not be for years to come.

I launched my dedicated bookish account on “bookstagram” in 2015 as a ravenous Stephen King fan encouraging others to read a book by his son, Joe Hill, titled N0S4A2. From there, I posted a simple, daily documentation of all the books I was reading. Community was soon formed out of a shared passion for reading, libraries, and running out of shelf space. Curating aesthetically pleasing flatlay photos of my book collection became an additional hobby adjacent to reading and buying books. I bought props to accent seasonal photos and would even bring my books “out in the wild” for photoshoots–a photo of East of Eden in a field, my childhood copy of The Hobbit at a local plant nursery with a replica of the shire, and I even took a book to my cousin’s wedding so I could photograph it with some cake and flowers in the background. 

I hosted my own challenge called #CircleofBookishFriends and every Fall we switched to #SeasonofHorror where we read classic and new horror through Autumn until Winter. My account began to see a lot of growth during the “Spooky Season,” as I became known in the community as a go-to destination for horror book recommendations. 

My username was, “Sadie_Reads_Them_All” which would change in a few years to the moniker, “Mother Horror”–a nickname given to me by my Night Worms business partner. She’s an avid Shirley Jackson fan, and it was through a readathon she hosted that the seed was planted, by way of “The Lottery” and We Have Always Lived in the Castle. 

At last, growth.

For the sake of keeping this story short and sharing the most I can about my journey with Shirley, I’m fast forwarding to the release of my second book, Feral and Hysterical: Mother Horror’s Ultimate Reading Guide to Dark and Disturbing Fiction by Women, and an invitation to be a juror for the Shirley Jackson Awards in the Fall of 2025. Both of these career milestones have enabled me to introduce fellow horror fans to Shirley Jackson and a multitude of other women.

This has changed my life.

The Shirley Jackson Awards organization allows each jury panel every year to define what it means to read submissions worthy of this honor. We, the jury, had a Zoom call to talk about this collectively and voice our individual thoughts to arrive at a collective consensus. With the shared collective in mind, I also set out to define this exercise for myself. As the organization collected submissions, I busied myself with reading Shirley Jackson’s short stories found in Dark Tales and The Lottery and Other Tales.

Here is the list of qualities I used while reading novels and novellas released in 2025 while considering them for the Shirley Jackson Awards:

• Mundane and trivial aspects of life mixed with the supernatural, paranormal, and the inexplicable
• Uncanny or mysterious elements rooted in realistic situations
• Eccentric, quirky, rebellious, ungovernable, and sometimes unlikable or unhappy female protagonists of “a certain age”
• The blend of horror with humor, sub-text, and author asides or social commentary
• Quiet, subtle horror layered with atmosphere and tension
• Psychological horror, anxiety, claustrophobia, and paranoia
• Scenes of behind-closed-doors, shared intimacy with the reader; private reflection, ostracized or private people, dysfunctional families, isolated/secluded small towns, marital troubles and the exhausting weight of living in community with other people
• Retelling old fables and legends with a modern, sinister twist
• The fear of being alone, of isolation, and too much introspection
• Embracing the weird

I loved reading books and having my list right next to me so I could occasionally remind myself what I was looking for…

The echoes of her style.

The fingerprints of her characters.

The hallmarks of her craft.

…and the ability to sense when her spirit was with me not just throughout this process of serving as a juror, but for the rest of my life as a Constant Reader with an Uncanny Soul.