The Books Are Talking Back — Vincent Cotroneo on Bookkeepers, Haunted Bookshops & the New Age of Horror

A bookshop is one of the quietest rooms most of us ever stand in. It's also stacked floor to ceiling with thousands of voices, hundreds of names, and every one of them with something to say. Vincent Cotroneo couldn't stop thinking about that — and it became a horror novel.

Bookkeepers is his debut in the genre, and this week he joined the Ghost & Quill podcast to talk about it: the book, the haunted bookshop at the centre of it, and a lifetime of horror obsession that started with a videotape and never really let go.

Meet Vincent Cotroneo

Vincent is 28, has a couple of poetry collections and a thriller novel behind him, and has just independently published his first horror novel.

"I've had a strong fascination with horror for a very long time," he says. "Since I was a kid, I saw The Ring, and it kind of piqued my interest as to that feeling of suspense and the growing dread. And it was that thing I was trying to continue to chase over and over and over again."

That chase, plus a genuine love of reading, is what put Bookkeepers in a haunted bookshop. "It has a lot of aspects of my personal life and the things that I find interesting about the genre, all in one place."

Marlene, it turns out, has form with The Ring too — watching it round the corner of a bedroom door, uninvited, spying on a friend's older brother, and ducking back out of sight every time it got bad.

The horror education: The Ring, The Exorcist, The Conjuring, Hereditary

Vincent can name the exact milestones. "It was The Ring, The Exorcist, The Conjuring, Hereditary. Those I can vividly trace — and I guess now would be Obsession, because I had that same reaction, where I had these moments of just awe."

What keeps him in the genre is that it refuses to sit still. "Horror's been such a staple ever since the medium came out, even since the 1920s and the 1910s. I just want to see where it continues to go, because as the voices continue to evolve and grow, the genre changes with it."

Marlene's point is that "horror" barely functions as a single label any more — there's the psychological slow-torture of a Freida McFadden, the subtle stuff you don't clock as horror until you look twice, and the soft horror that eases people into the idea of enjoying being frightened.

Vincent thinks the current wave lands because it's finally speaking to the people watching it. "We look at horror films of the past and distance ourselves from them, because they were made for a different generation and what scared them. I feel like it's catching up with the generation now. We're having such new voices come out — especially from YouTube."

Why we do this to ourselves

Marlene brings up Ed and Lorraine Warren, and the strange modern appetite for horror rooted in supposedly real events — "can we touch that spiritual horror with someone that is real? Could there be other reasons why the world feels like it's going to shit?"

Vincent's answer comes second-hand from Stephen King.

"There's that story of the guy that keeps hitting his head on the wall, and somebody asks him, 'Why are you doing that?' And the guy says, 'Because it feels good when I stop.' I think the audience gasped when he said it. But it's so true. We seek this out and we're in a suspension of disbelief, being like — wow, my life is really shitty, but it's not that shitty."

The other half of it, he argues, is texture. The Conjuring and The Exorcist both work because they feel like documentaries. "The first Conjuring looks so gritty and grounded — one long continuous take tracking through the house, right at the beginning, meant to immerse you. And The Exorcist was made by a documentarian. William Friedkin's style was that documentary, hands-on, in-the-moment feeling. The more realistic and grounded you are, the more your belief is suspended."

Found footage, and letting the audience do the work

Which is how the conversation lands on The Blair Witch Project (1999 — confirmed live on the episode, after a genuinely delightful side quest), Paranormal Activity, and [REC].

"I have never been so unsettled in a movie, like waiting for something to happen," Vincent says of Paranormal Activity. "That's when I learned what terror and dread was."

Marlene agrees it was never really the door-opening, drag-you-out-of-bed moment. It was the two hours of waiting for it.

Later in the episode Vincent ties this back to Tarantino's refusal to explain the scar on Brad Pitt's neck in Inglourious Basterds, or what's in the briefcase in Pulp Fiction: "That's your movie. You get to decide that. And if I tell you what that is, I'm taking that movie away from you and it's now mine."

"You look into that dark corner and you think you see something — and you do, because you're imagining it. It's yours."

Inside Bookkeepers

The book follows Robert, a writer who wants, more than anything, to live up to the expectations of his eleven-year-old daughter. She's a hard critic. She seeks out his books. He wants to be better for her.

Meanwhile his wife takes over the running of the local family bookshop — a business Robert wants no part of, because being surrounded by other people's published work all day starts to feel like being mocked by it. "It's like, ha ha, you're not doing what — you're not here with us, you're stuck in your own head."

Then his wife dies in the bookshop. Unexplained.

And his daughter stops being able to read. The words vanish off the page. Is it trauma? Is it grief? Is she simply unable to pick up what her mother left behind?

"But then the books start talking back to her. They start influencing her to do certain things — not things an eleven-year-old should be doing. And it's all due to the hands that are puppeteering this bookstore from the very beginning: taunting the father, influencing the daughter, and leading to some pretty crazy stuff."

The seed of it was ordinary. Getting lost in local bookshops. Noticing the quiet.

"It's quiet in here, but it's not, right? You're surrounded by thousands and thousands of words by hundreds of authors, seeing their names — there's a lot of stories here, and it could be pretty loud if you listen to it."

Writing it: a year, a playlist, and nobody to answer to

Vincent writes to music, mostly, with stretches of silence when he needs to push through. Bookkeepers took about a year.

The hard part wasn't the writing. It was stopping. "Like Robert in the story, I can never be done. I'm always questioning myself and trying to live up to the expectations that I put for me. Because this was independently published, I didn't have somebody telling me you have to be done by this time. It's me. I set my own deadlines. And once it's out there, I'm like — all right, well, now what?"

It's since found its way into a few bookshops and picked up some genuine praise. What keeps him going is the community: "I really like talking with fellow horror fans. The genre's always changing, and I love finding new voices."

Asked to name his genre, he lands somewhere between psychological horror and something he invented in one of his earlier books: the unconscious subconscious. "I don't even know what that means, but it's my own little world where I let the ideas present themselves. Sometimes the boat is going in a direction you never would have expected. Call it psychological, literary, horror, whatever — dealing with the human mind and the things that influence our decisions, that's where I like to be."

Where did the fascination with the mind come from? Philosophy classes, partly. Mostly Shutter Island, watched with his dad, who had to pause it and explain the entire film back to him. "I love the fact that the audience is tricked and led to believe something that's not true. That's never left since."

Marlene's verdict: he's going to be a literary trickster. He'll take it.

Endings that make or break the whole thing

This is where the episode gets heated, in the best way.

Vincent on Hereditary: "You love that family so much because you spent so much time with them. Once the father goes up in flames, the domino effect trickles to where you're like — we're going to lose this whole family."

On Late Night with the Devil: initially disappointed, because it switches medium right at the end, then won over. "It took me a while to sit with it and absorb it. And I accepted it."

On Speak No Evil (the original): "The ending is so tragic it actually physically hurt me. That was so uncomfortable and so hard to watch that I was revolted, and I hated it — in a good way."

Marlene's contribution is Hide and Seek, watched at the cinema, loved right up until the final thirty seconds, at which point she said something out loud that made the entire auditorium laugh.

The TBR shame pile

Vincent's confession: Crime and Punishment. Never read it. "So many people on social media talk about it and I just feel left out." He's working up to The Count of Monte Cristo, treating Dostoevsky as the interim training weight. He's currently reading Stoner by John Williams — "one of the greatest books I've probably ever read. How did I miss this?"

Other favourites: Stephen King, Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, Hunter S. Thompson, and Flight by Sherman Alexie.

Marlene's confession is worse, given the venue: she owns The Exorcist, Frankenstein and Dracula, and has read none of them. She's just started One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest instead, having walked outside on the first day of autumn and declared classics season officially open.

Vincent's reading order for the three horror classics

1. Start with Frankenstein. "It was so foundational to the genre. I will never not talk highly of that story."
2. Then The Exorcist. The one that got to him hardest — and, unusually, a book he rates above the film. "I've never had to turn a book away from the bookshelf because it felt like it was haunting me. Hand of God, I had to turn the thing away."
3. Save Dracula for last. "That one's a workout. The first three chapters are some of the greatest horror I've ever read — just getting to Dracula's castle. But then there's a lot of in-between where it's like, we're going to get Dracula, we're going to get Dracula. All right, we saw him for two seconds. Now another hundred pages of we're really going to get him, guys." (Van Helsing, for the record, is "amazing".)

On adaptations: Bela Lugosi's Dracula is still the definitive screen version, but the Universal film cut characters that are integral to the novel — "I had this false preconception as to who's who." The most faithful recent take, in a strange way, is Robert Eggers' Nosferatu.

And Marlene bought her Dracula in Whitby, which she was assured is the UK Dracula town — a claim immediately disputed from the next room by her fiancé, who maintains that Slains Castle, just up the road from them in Aberdeenshire, is the real one. A road trip is now pencilled in.

Obsession, Hokum and Backrooms

The last stretch of the episode is about the film that has, in Marlene's words, "freaked the men out" — and the fact that a great many women have found this extremely funny.

Vincent thinks Obsession is the next Hereditary: the film everything else gets measured against. "Everybody was comparing themselves to Obsession. We had Hokum, we had Obsession, and we had Backrooms, and every subsequent film after that was compared to it."

He's struck that it came from a male filmmaker so aware of those particular fears and anxieties. "It wasn't pandering. It felt so realistic and it was so honest. And it could not have been cast better." Bear, he notes, works both ways — tragic victim of circumstance, or villain. Your call. That's the point.

On Backrooms, his advice is to watch Kane Parsons' YouTube series first. Eight episodes, ranging from two minutes to forty. "It helps you understand the world, so when you see the movie you can see — it definitely fits in here, I know exactly where this location is." The genius of it, he says, is that the threat is never the same twice: the Backrooms manifest something different for each person who falls in. Marlene's comparison — a new Nightmare on Elm Street, where the villain is a space and a silence rather than a personality — gets an immediate yes.

What's next

For Vincent: Robert Eggers' Werewolf, which he can barely wait for. "Everything he's done has felt bigger and bigger. He's going to have to make a movie on the moon next." And Angel Down by Daniel Kraus — a horror novel written as one continuous sentence — which he's deliberately going into cold.

He's also already writing book two. Not a sequel to Bookkeepers. "I'm very proud of Bookkeepers. But I have more to say."

Marlene's closing observation, courtesy of a post she saw online: with Werewolf landing at Christmas, we are all in for a very pagan festive season. Vincent approves. "It's the best of times and the worst of times. We're back to the Dickens winter."

 

Frequently asked questions

What is Bookkeepers about?

Bookkeepers is Vincent Cotroneo's debut horror novel. It follows Robert, a writer whose wife takes over a local family bookshop and then dies there unexplained. His eleven-year-old daughter loses the ability to read — the words vanish from the page — and then the books begin talking back to her, and influencing her.

Who is Vincent Cotroneo?

Vincent Cotroneo is a 28-year-old independently published author. Before Bookkeepers he published two poetry collections and a thriller novel. Bookkeepers is his first horror novel and has been picked up by a number of bookshops.

What order should you read Frankenstein, Dracula and The Exorcist?

Vincent recommends Frankenstein first as the foundational text, The Exorcist second — he rates the novel above the film — and Dracula last, because the pacing between its brilliant opening chapters and its finale demands more patience.

Why does found footage horror work so well?

Because it hands the work to the audience. Films like The Blair Witch Project, Paranormal Activity and [REC] use grounded, documentary-style realism to suspend disbelief, then let the viewer's own imagination supply the threat — which is always scarier than anything shown on screen.