{"id":9078,"date":"2026-05-19T10:44:56","date_gmt":"2026-05-19T16:44:56","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/cherscholar.com\/cherblog\/?p=9078"},"modified":"2026-05-19T12:46:58","modified_gmt":"2026-05-19T18:46:58","slug":"sonny-cher-2022-gothic-horror-novel","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/cherscholar.com\/cherblog\/2026\/05\/sonny-cher-2022-gothic-horror-novel\/","title":{"rendered":"Sonny & Cher Find Their Way Into a 2022 Gothic Horror Novel"},"content":{"rendered":"

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So one of the most pleasurable tags for me to activate on this blog is “Cher in Art & Literature” because this is a cross-hatch of my jams. So when I’m reading a random novel and a Cher reference comes up, I make sure everyone in the room is aware of this.<\/p>\n

And this is for a lot of reasons: it signifies Cher’s broader cultural relevance, it speaks to my inner child having her aesthetic choices justified against all the naysayers (mostly her two older brothers) and also because it’s just fun.<\/p>\n

The first time this happened was in Junior High when I came across the popular girl’s 1970s library book Lisa, Bright and Dark<\/em> by John Neufeld about a preteen girl with a burgeoning mental illness. She was a Cher fan, as I recall, and as the novel was published in 1969 this pop cultural reference gave Lisa a place in pop-cultural time. By the time I read the book, Cher was already passe again and so it felt good to read about another young girl Cher fan out there somewhere in the Universe (albeit one with a mental illness).<\/p>\n

Lately, (50 years later), I’ve been reading gothic horror as a kind of mental sorbet between my more literary and socially-heavy book-club novels. I think I’ve read most of Darcy Coates’ haunted house ouvre, really simple fiction with a lot of haunted house scares deployed really efficiently. When I was at Barnes & Nobles a month ago trying to find Cher’s 80th birthday issue of People Magazine <\/em>(more on that later), I took a quick spin through the haunted house shelf and found Ghost Woods<\/em> billed as a\u00a0 “feminist gothic.” This has actually come up in one of my book clubs so it wasn’t a new genre idea (Silvia Moreno-Garcia’s <\/span>Mexican Gothic <\/span><\/em>and Anna Biller\u2019s horrifying Bluebeard\u2019s Castle) <\/em><\/span>but there aren’t that many of these books out there yet.<\/p>\n

What made C.J. Cooke’s Ghost Woods <\/em>a feminist story is that it explores the harrowing and cruel experiences unwed mother’s once went through while staying at British and Irish care homes in the 1950s and 1960s.<\/p>\n

So it’s a period novel dealing with a group of women sequestered beyond the reach of pop culture. This is an important point of the novel. They’re without a TV. Their mail has been cut off. They’re not allowed to leave. Plenty scary without the ghosts, if you ask me. So the book takes some small pains to let us know what these girls are missing. Just an aside to place us in pop-cultural time, not a big part of the novel.<\/p>\n

For the 1950s unwed mother Mabel, this means Elvis. For the 1960s unwed mother Pearl, this means Sonny & Cher’s appearance on Top of the Pops<\/em>. I figure this could have been in August 1965, when they appeared to lip synch “I Got You Babe<\/a>” or a year later in August 1966 when they came on to do “Little Man.” It’s hard to say which is more likely. Pearl knows they are set to appear ahead of time and she knows she will miss it. Sonny & Cher are mentioned three times in the novel, the last time when she speaks to her mother on the phone and her mother says her parents watched Top of the Pops<\/em> without her.<\/p>\n\n\t\t