9 New Books We Recommend This Week

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/01/books/review/9-new-books-we-recommend-this-week.html

Version 0 of 1.

Halloween may be over, but there’s still plenty of reason to be scared. Our recommended titles this week include books about blood, serial killers, witches and plague, along with a new Stephen King novel and the harrowing last letters of Sylvia Plath.

Gregory CowlesSenior Editor, Books

NINE PINTS: A Journey Through the Money, Medicine, and Mysteries of Blood, by Rose George. (Metropolitan Books, $30.) To write about blood, the British journalist Rose George covered many thousands of miles in pursuit of the intricacies of the subject. The book has many heroic figures in it, including Janet Vaughan, who overcame an extraordinary amount of sexism to become a pioneer figure in the development of blood transfusions. George also writes about her own health problems, arguing that there has never been enough research about women’s health, and there still is not. But the book “does not have a memoirish feel,” our critic Dwight Garner writes. “As if George were pinching and expanding an image on a screen, ‘Nine Pints’ expands to open up a world.”

THE LETTERS OF SYLVIA PLATH: Volume 2: 1956-1963, edited by Peter K. Steinberg and Karen V. Kukil. (Harper, $45.) The first volume of Sylvia Plath’s letters, published last year, revealed the young Plath, from summer camp to Smith College, intent on two goals: to flay herself into becoming a writer and to marry. In this new book of letters, written between 1956 and 1963, ending a week before Plath’s death, at 30, we see those goals “triumphantly and tragically fulfilled,” our critic Parul Sehgal writes. In 14 recently uncovered letters to the psychiatrist who’d treated her since her suicide attempt in college, we see Plath at her most vulnerable. “It feels almost taboo to read these,” Sehgal writes, “so unabashed is her pain and humiliation, her sexual envy.”

ELEVATION, by Stephen King. (Scribner, $19.95.) The master of horror brings us back to the fictional town of Castle Rock for a short novel about a man and his curious affliction: Though he looks as if he weighs 240 pounds, the scale says otherwise. The numbers keep getting lower and lower as the tension in this fantastical story increases. “King also has in mind the weight of close-mindedness and prejudice,” Gilbert Cruz writes in his review, noting that one of King’s “great strengths is the ease with which he can sketch a community or a group of friends.” Cruz adds that the book has “a sweetness that feels like something new for King. It’s heavy out there right now. Here’s something that’s not.”

DAEMON VOICES: On Stories and Storytelling, by Philip Pullman. (Knopf, $30.) This enchanting illustrated collection of essays and lectures by the British author best known for his children’s trilogy “His Dark Materials” is animated by wit, erudition and a passionate interest in how stories are made. It closes with a call for a secular, egalitarian understanding of humanity and the universe, and asks how that might be expressed in children’s literature. “If that sounds like a tall order for kids’ books,” our reviewer, Laura Miller, writes, “this is in fact the essence of Pullman’s appeal: He takes children seriously. He addresses them as intelligent, moral beings struggling to make sense of the world. He writes clearly when writing for them because that’s how he writes for everyone.”

MELMOTH, by Sarah Perry. (Custom House, $27.99.) In this Gothic stunner, set chiefly in contemporary Prague and based loosely on the 19th-century horror novel “Melmoth the Wanderer,” a cursed woman has roamed the earth throughout history, bearing witness to human suffering. “It is a scary novel that chills to the bone even as it points the way to a warmer, more humane, place,” Danielle Trussoni writes in a roundup of recent horror books. “Terror is not the point, nor is menace, exactly, although the novel offers both. The real horror of this novel is not the ghostly Melmoth at all, but the cruelty we human beings enact upon one another.”

SONS OF CAIN: A History of Serial Killers From the Stone Age to the Present, by Peter Vronsky. (Berkley, paper, $17.) A lineup of fabled murderers, with special emphasis on the “golden age” of serial killers in America (1950-2000), draws a link between the trained killers of wartime and the generations that follow them. “Vronsky has an alarming theory about the ‘enormous glut’ of American serial murderers who came of age during World War II and the postwar baby boom,” Marilyn Stasio writes, reviewing the book alongside other recent true-crime titles. “He observes that the offenders who made their first kill during the peak years … ‘all lived in the wake of a receding shock wave of humanity’s biggest, most viciously primitive and most lethal war.’”

IN THE NAME OF THE CHILDREN: An F.B.I. Agent’s Relentless Pursuit of the Nation’s Worst Predators, by Jeffrey L. Rinek and Marilee Strong. (BenBella, paper, $16.95.) Revisiting some of his most important and affecting cases, Rinek gives readers a detailed account of the F.B.I.’s tactics and procedures with a delivery that “sounds warm and humane, qualities missing from much crime writing,” Marilyn Stasio writes in her true-crime roundup. The book is “a professional job, filled with illuminating details about the day-to-day operations of the bureau. Particularly interesting are the regular interviews agents are granted with sex offenders who are about to be paroled. … Rinek’s voice,” Stasio adds, “softens when he speaks of victims.”

IN THE HOUSE IN THE DARK OF THE WOODS, by Laird Hunt. (Little, Brown, $22.) Hunt’s slim, dark novel reads like a fairy tale more twisted than Grimm. There are witches and a menacing character named Granny Someone and a lot to be scared of in the cellar. Hunt evokes countless stories embedded in the American consciousness — and then makes them even more terrifying. “It is tempting to seek a moral in the end. … But Hunt isn’t that predictable or didactic,” Eowyn Ivey writes in her review. “This is a perfect book to read when you’re safely tucked in your home, your back to the wall, while outside your door the wind rips the leaves from the trees and the woods grow dark.”

CITY OF CROWS, by Chris Womersley. (Europa, paper, $17.) Set amid a plague in 17th-century France, this chilling novel features a mother who succumbs to witchcraft and a grifter with a gift for the tarot. “The author’s enthusiasm fuels the slow-burning horror of his tale,” our reviewer, Katharine Grant, writes. “Sometimes in a Gothic novel authors lose courage and prettify the end. No danger of that here. Unafraid to go where the novel has taken him, Womersley produces a finale that’s both slippery and perfectly in keeping.”