Susan Flockhart

With October long gone and high streets already ablaze with Christmas tat, Halloween spooks may seem far behind us. But perhaps that’s to misunderstand the nature of the coming season: a festival of light that apparently has darkness - and a swarm of terrifying monsters - at its heart. For much of European history, writes Sarah Clegg, midwinter revelry was underpinned by menace and The Dead of Winter offers an entertaining guide to some of our ancestors’ scariest seasonal traditions.

The Gravity of Feathers: Fame, Fortune and the Story of St Kilda

You can never be too rich or too thin. The American socialite Wallis Simpson may never have said that, but model Kate Moss certainly did once declare that “nothing tastes as good as skinny feels”.

On the morning after a storm, Jen Hadfield is often seen “nit-combing” her nearest beach, foraging for seaweed-entangled treasures that have washed ashore. Past trawls have uncovered a can of Korean hairspray; a tub of Soviet-era grease; a creepy doll’s head with a barnacle-pocked face; a message in a bottle inviting the finder to “be a devil and write to me”; and a mysterious lump of wax that may have time-travelled from the days when clipper ships carried barrels of tallow in their holds.

Are Scotland’s bothies attracting the ‘wrong sort of person’?

In Edinburgh, a hospital-bound cholera van was attacked by a crowd convinced its human cargo was destined to become surgical fodder. Meanwhile, when a new, unconsecrated paupers’ cemetery was created on Paisley’s outskirts, terrified locals dug up graves only to find them devoid of bodies. “The obvious next step,” writes Flanders, “was to attack the cholera hospital itself, where they believed the exhumed dead had been taken for anatomisation.”

Craiglockhart Hydropathic is a grand Victorian mansion in the south-west of Edinburgh. Now part of Napier University, it was built in 1878 as a luxurious spa hotel, allowing the “worried wealthy” to reap the curative benefits of clean air, fine views, Turkish baths and manicured croquet lawns.

The Bone Cave: A Journey Through Myth And Memory Dougie Strang  Birlinn, £14.99

Free For All: Why the NHS is Worth Saving Dr Gavin Francis  Wellcome Collection, £7.99

Carl MacDougall’s impact on Scottish literature was profound. “He may well have had more influence on the Scottish writing scene than any other author,” wrote David Manderson in his Herald obituary, referring not just to MacDougall’s distinguished works, including the novels Stone Over Water and The Lights Below, but to his role as editor, creative writing teacher and former president of Scottish PEN.