In the first chapter of The Message, Coates talks about being haunted by a story he read. That haunting drove him to ask questions, research, and wake up to an issue he hadn’t known about. On page 20 he writes, “But then a writer told me a story and I saw something essential and terrible about the world. All our conversations of technique, of rhythm and metaphor, ultimately come down to this—to the stories we tell, to the need to haunt, which is to say to make people feel all that is now at stake.” What is the first memory you have of reading something that haunted you? How did it make you feel, and what were the stakes? What questions did that haunting compel you to ask? And what questions and thoughts did you have about Coates’s hauntings in this book?
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Already said my first one as a reply to another comment but a weird one for me later was "The Work and the Glory" series. I was raised Mormon and the work and the glory was a thick book series following a fictional family from the very beginnings of the Mormon church. I was probably 11 when I read them and they're full of apologetics but there was a scene where one of the main characters finds out about polygamy for the first time and it was devastating. She eventually finds peace with it but I never did! I had a pit in my stomach for weeks.
The first book that haunted me was Elie Wiesel’s “Night”. a searing account of the Holocaust. I was probably around 11 or 12 when I read it and I remember being so shocked by the depravity if the Germans and what human beings are capable if. That shock has never left me and I hope it never does…