Chocolate Mouse, anyone? Rosemary’s Baby was a smash hit on release - the best selling horror novel of the 1960s, eventually selling over 4 million copies. The year after publication it was adapted into one of the greatest films of the decade - directed by Roman Polanski with Mia Farrow as the eponymous heroine.

At first glance, it seems that Ira Levin’s story was at odds with the prevailing spirit of free love - read the room, baby! But as we’re going to find out - the secret of Rosemary’s Baby is that it perfectly captured the spirit and anxieties of the age. Ira Levin would repeat the trick with the Stepford Wives in 1972 and The Boys From Brazil in 1976, but Rosemary’s Baby is his masterpiece. A book which is simultaneously an outlandish fantasy and one of the greatest novels about coercive gaslighting relationships.

Sophie and Jonty ask a tough question: is Levin's depiction of a coercive relationship just too real? Do we come away feeling that Rosemary has real power and agency that speaks to us now, or is the book's depiction of domestic violence and misogyny and trapped in its own cultural moment just as much as the stuffed mushrooms and Gibsons the couple consume on the fateful night that the horror takes hold?

Content Warning: the book and film — and this conversation — contain descriptions of sexual violence, rape and abusive relationships.

Books and Film Referred to:

Ira Levin, Rosemary's Baby

Roman Polanski, Rosemary's Baby

F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

Jane Austen, Emma

J.D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye

Tom Wolfe, The Bonfire of the Vanities

Betty Friedan, The Feminine Mystique

Charlotte Bronte, Jane Eyre

Adrienne Rich, "In the Evening"

Valerie Solanas, SCUM Manifesto

Andrea Dworkin, Women Hating

Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror

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Who's afraid of American horror? Sophie and Jonty, for starters. To celebrate halloween, SLOB is taking a deep dive into three classics of the American Horror genre. We've chosen novels published after 1945, and we're asking how the war - and its many aftershocks and resonances in American domestic and political life - transformed horror as a literary genre. We won't spoil the surprises by telling you all the titles ahead of time. But be warned: read and listen at your own peril.

We’ll be looking at these books in chronological order. The first is Shirley Jackson's The Haunting of Hill House, published in 1959 and is now considered one of the most influential horror novels of all time. It is beautifully written, incredibly funny and genuinely scary. It's imbued with a spirit of cynicism and evil. As a result it disorientated many readers who knew Jackson not as a horror writer, but for her charming memoirs about life as a housewife in 1950s suburbia.

Join us as we enter the locked gates of Hill House and explore how this gripping, poignant, strange — and above all, scary — ghost story took shape and how Shirley Jackson came to be regarded as one of the greatest mid-century American writers.

Further Reading and listening:

Shirley Jackson, "Life Among the Savages" (1953)

Shirley Jackson, "The Haunting of Hill House" (1959)

Shirley Jackson, "We Have Always Lived in the Castle" (1962)

Ruth Franklin, Shirley Jackson: A Rather Haunted Life, 2016

On the Road with Penguin Classics Halloween episode with Ruth Franklin: https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/the-haunting-of-hill-house-with-ruth/id1549179379?i=1000633191567

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Jonty and Sophie were separated by an ocean while Sophie and her family went back to New York and Jonty stayed in Sydney - so they made lemonade out of life's lemons, and created two miniature episodes about the great 16th-century French essayist Michel de Montaigne.

Montaigne isn't just any old essayist — he's the man who invented the form, with three volumes of brilliant, surprising, constantly fresh and astonishingly modern sallies on every possible topic. To introduce Montaigne and unpack his brilliance and immense influence, Sophie talked to the Renaissance scholar Stephen Greenblatt. Meanwhile, Sydney-side, Jonty had a conversation with the historian and writer Rowan Tomlinson, a specialist on Montaigne and Renaissance studies at the University of Bristol. They take the Montaigne chat in many unexpected directions, and Jonty initiates discussion of the Reformation off his own bat, with Sophie nowhere to be found.

Further Reading:

The Complete Essays of Michel de Montaigne, (Penguin 1993)

Sarah Bakewell, How to Live: Or A Life of Montaigne in One Question and Twenty Attempts at an Answer, (2011)

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