Every newsletter comes from somewhere.
Not just an idea, or a gap in the market, or some strategy cooked up in a spreadsheet. It comes from years of reading — from afternoons spent on particular books that lodged themselves somewhere deep and wouldn’t leave. The Yarning Room is no different. Before the essays arrive in earnest, before the field guides to real ghosts and forgotten disasters and the dark corners of the English calendar, it felt right to lay out the reading that made all of this feel necessary.
These are the books I’d press into the hands of anyone who wants to understand what this newsletter is trying to do. Some are ghost fiction. Some are post-apocalyptic — several of them, in fact, because the post-apocalyptic imagination will be one of the things this newsletter keeps returning to. Some are folklore. What they share is a quality I’ve found almost impossible to name precisely — call it atmospheric seriousness. They take their subjects with full conviction. They don’t wink at the reader.
That’s what The Yarning Room is trying to do too.
The Death of Grass — John Christopher
Published in 1956 and largely forgotten outside specialist circles, this is one of the most unsettling English novels of the twentieth century. A virus destroys all grasses worldwide — wheat, barley, rice, everything — and England collapses within weeks. What Christopher understood, and what the thriller-paced plot makes viscerally clear, is that civilisation is not robust. It is a thin crust over something much older and much harder, and when the food runs out, the crust breaks fast. The violence in this book is not sensationalised. It is matter-of-fact, which is worse. A direct ancestor of everything The Yarning Room finds interesting about the post-collapse imagination.
The Road — Cormac McCarthy
Perhaps the most widely read book on this list, and for good reason. McCarthy strips everything back — syntax, punctuation, all comfort — until what remains is pure exposure: a father and a son walking through the ash of a dead America. The landscape is theological. The love between father and child is the only warmth left in the world, and McCarthy never lets you forget how close it is to being extinguished.
It is not an easy read. It leaves a mark.
If your appetite for the end of things runs more toward the English countryside than the American highway, pair it with John Wyndham’s The Day of the Triffids — which manages to be somehow both cosier and equally bleak.
English Folk and Fairy Tales — Joseph Jacobs
Collected in the 1890s, this is one of the great source texts for anyone interested in English folklore — and the stories have aged not at all. The voice is dry, often deadpan, occasionally mordant. Giants are outwitted. Bargains are struck and broken. The dead return in forms that aren’t quite right. What strikes a modern reader is how little sentimentality there is. These weren’t stories designed to comfort children; they were stories designed to do something older and more ambiguous than comfort. Jacobs knew that, and it shows.
This is the kind of material that will feed directly into future Yarning Room essays on the English calendar and its stranger edges.
A Canticle for Leibowitz — Walter M. Miller Jr.
The most serious post-apocalyptic novel ever written, and almost certainly the least read on this list outside science fiction circles.
It’s also my favourite.
Set across twelve centuries following a nuclear war, it follows a monastery in the American desert as civilisation collapses, recovers, and destroys itself again. Miller’s theme is the cyclical nature of human catastrophe — not pessimism exactly, but something harder: the suggestion that the pattern does not break, that knowledge is preserved and then burned, over and over. The prose in the first section is extraordinary. The ending is not comfortable. Neither is the question it leaves you sitting with.
The Earth Abides — George R. Stewart
Published in 1949, this is the quietest of the great catastrophe novels and in some ways the strangest.
A plague kills almost everyone. The protagonist, Ish, survives and spends the rest of his long life watching what remains of humanity revert, generation by generation, to something pre-literate and pre-industrial. He cannot stop it. He eventually stops trying. What Stewart is interested in is not survival but time — the long, slow work of forgetting, and what it means to be the last person who remembers.
For a novel about the end of everything, it is remarkably unhurried. That unhurriedness is the point.
Ghost Stories of an Antiquary — M.R. James
The essential collection.
James wrote most of his ghost stories to be read aloud to students at King’s College, Cambridge, on Christmas Eve, and they carry that intimacy — a learned man by a fire, describing things he would really rather not have seen.
The setting is almost always antiquarian: old churches, country houses, manuscripts, cathedral libraries. Which is to say, they are set in exactly the places The Yarning Room tends to haunt.
There’s more — there is always more — but these six are the ones I’d hand to a reader and say: this is the territory. By the time you’ve finished them, you’ll understand The Yarning Room better than any introduction I could write.
Until next time.
— Neil
PS — The Joseph Jacobs is available free on Project Gutenberg. The M.R. James stories have been out of copyright for decades and are similarly available. There is no excuse not to read both this weekend.
I have read: The Road — Cormac McCarthy. I've saved - A Canticle for Leibowitz — Walter M. Miller Jr - for a later date, and the Fairy Tales. Thanks.