Inside Ritual Reads, Whitchurch's Home for the Strange and Spectral This Independent Bookshop Week

There's a particular hush that settles over a good bookshop just after the bell above the door stops ringing. Dust motes drift through the light. A floorboard settles somewhere in the back. And the spines on the shelves seem to lean ever so slightly toward you, as if they're curious about who's just walked in.

That's the atmosphere we wanted to bottle when we sat down with Amanda, the woman behind Whitchurch's most delightfully peculiar bookshop. With Independent Bookshop Week upon us, it felt like high time the Grimoire turned its candlelight on the keeper of our favourite haunt. So we lit a few candles, pulled up a chair among the horror and the esoterica, and asked her the questions we'd always wanted to.

What follows is Amanda, in her own words. Unedited, unembellished, and refreshingly honest about what it actually means to run an independent bookshop in 2026.

Why Whitchurch, Why the Weird

We began at the beginning, because every good story does. What draws a person to build a shop around the strange and the spectral, and why plant it here, in a market town with more centuries behind it than streetlights?

"I've always loved books that explore the strange, the magical, and the unknown. Horror, sci-fi, fantasy, and esoteric titles offer both escapism and new ways of looking at the world, which feels especially important at a time when many people are looking for a break from the constant cycle of bad news and uncertainty. Whitchurch's history and character made it the perfect home for Ritual Reads. I wanted to create something a little different, a bookshop where readers could discover unusual books and connect with others who share their interests. Independent Bookshop Week is a celebration of the unique role indie bookshops play in their communities. It's a chance to recognise the value of shopping local and to thank the customers whose support makes businesses like mine possible."

It's a lovely thing to admit out loud, that escapism isn't frivolous but necessary. There's an old idea, one that runs from the Gothic novelists right through to the pulp magazines, that we read about monsters precisely because the real world is frightening enough on its own. A haunted house on the page is a place where the terror has rules. It has a beginning, a middle, and (usually) a survivor. And honestly, in a year like this one, who could blame anyone for wanting a little controlled dread on a grey afternoon?

Fun Fact Cauldron
Independent Bookshop Week is no fledgling spell. It turns twenty in 2026. First cast back in 2006, the campaign now gathers nearly 800 independent bookshops across the UK and Ireland under one banner each June, all of them throwing open their doors to celebrate the wonderfully unkillable institution that is the local bookshop.

More Than a Room Full of Books

Ask anyone who's spent a slow Saturday in a proper independent, and they'll tell you the books are only half the magic. We wanted to know what Ritual Reads actually is, on a normal Tuesday, when the door keeps swinging and the bell never quite gets a rest.

"For me, it's all about community. Day-to-day, Ritual Reads is much more than a shop selling books. It's a place where people come to chat, discover new authors, meet like-minded readers, attend book clubs and events surrounded by books they love."

This is rather the whole point of Independent Bookshop Week. A shop like this is a piece of civic life dressed up as retail. You can't download a conversation, and you certainly can't stream the particular pleasure of a stranger thrusting a battered paperback at you and insisting, eyes wide, that it changed their life. Those things happen in rooms. Specifically, they happen in rooms that smell faintly of candle wax and old paper, with someone behind the counter who actually remembers what you read last month.

The Victorians had their reading rooms, where people gathered to think and argue and quietly judge one another's choices. We have ours too, only with better lighting and a tarot deck near the till.

The Gift of a Narrow Path

Some bookshops try to be everything to everyone, with a shelf for every conceivable taste and a personality as neutral as a hotel lobby. Ritual Reads chose the shadowed, far more interesting road. We asked Amanda whether specialising in genre fiction and the occult changes the way readers relate to the shop.

"Because our focus is quite niche, the conversations tend to go deeper than simply 'What's your next read?' People share their interests, experiences, and passions, which allows us to make genuinely personal recommendations. Over time, those interactions build real relationships and a sense of community."

There's something to that. When you walk into a shop that knows exactly what it is, you tend to reveal a little more of what you are. You don't just ask for a thriller. You confess that you've read everything Shirley Jackson ever wrote and you're quietly worried nothing will ever frighten you so beautifully again. (We've all been there. We Have Always Lived in the Castle does that to a person.)

A recommendation engine can tell you that people who bought one cursed book also bought another. It can't lean across the counter and say, oh, you'll want to be sitting down for the ending of this one.

The Honest Bit

We promised Amanda we wouldn't make this all candlelight and cosy shelves, so we asked the unglamorous question. What's genuinely hard about doing this, and what keeps her doing it anyway?

"Running an independent bookshop in 2026 is incredibly rewarding, but it definitely comes with its challenges. Rising costs across the board from rent and utilities to wages and stock mean that margins can be very tight. At the same time, we're competing not only with online giants like Amazon, which can heavily discount books, but also with supermarkets that often sell bestselling titles at little or no profit simply to get customers through the door. What keeps me doing it is seeing the connections that happen here every day. Watching someone discover a new favourite author, seeing friendships form through our events, or hearing customers tell us that the shop has become one of their favourite places in town makes all the hard work worthwhile. Books bring people together, and being able to create a space for that is a privilege."

Worth sitting with that for a moment. The economics of independent bookselling can feel like fighting a hydra, where you cut one cost and two more rise up to take its place. Every book sold at a deep discount somewhere else is a small, quiet pressure on shops like this one, the ones that price honestly because they can't afford to do otherwise.

And yet the thing that keeps the lights on was never really the margins. It's the moment a regular tells you the shop has become their favourite place in town. That's the one spell nobody can undercut, no matter how vast their warehouse.

So here's the gentle nudge, and we'll only make it once. If you love places like this, the most powerful charm you've got is your own two feet. Walk in. Buy the book. Order the strange one they have to fetch from the back. That's the whole ritual, really, and it tends to work.

One Book, Pressed Firmly Into Your Hands

We couldn't let her go without the question every bookseller secretly longs to answer. What's the one title she can't stop recommending right now?

"One book I'm constantly pressing into people's hands right now is The Ritual by Adam Nevill. I have a very high threshold when it comes to horror and expect a lot from books that claim to be genuinely frightening, but this one absolutely delivers. It's atmospheric, unsettling, and builds a real sense of dread that gets under your skin. The feeling of isolation and the growing terror in the wilderness is incredibly well done, and it's one of the few horror novels that terrorised me in all the right ways."

High praise from someone who, by her own admission, is hard to scare. There's a special kind of trust in a recommendation like that, the seasoned reader who's wandered through countless haunted forests and still found one that made the hairs rise. When the keeper of a horror bookshop tells you a book got under her skin, the only sensible response is to keep the lights on while you read it.

Ritual Reads Recommends: The Ritual by Adam Nevill. A slow-burning descent into dread for anyone who likes their wilderness genuinely unfriendly. Perfect for fans of folk horror, doomed hiking trips, and that creeping certainty that something in the trees is watching. (It later prowled its way onto the screen in a 2017 film adaptation, but as ever, the book got there first and frightened us better.)

Fun Fact Cauldron
The "press a book into someone's hands" instinct has a name in the trade. It's called handselling, and it's the one bit of bookshop sorcery that has never been successfully automated. No pop-up, no banner ad, no "customers also bought" has ever matched the conviction of a real bookseller saying trust me on this one.

The Last Word

What stayed with us, after the candles had burned low and the recorder clicked off, wasn't the spookiness of the place (though there's plenty) or the cleverness of the curation (though there's that too). It was the warmth. Underneath all the eldritch delights and the artfully arranged dread, Ritual Reads is a place built to bring people together. Readers who might never otherwise have met, trading titles across the shelves like incantations.

That's what Independent Bookshop Week is for. Not only to remind us these shops exist, but to remind us they're worth keeping. A town with a strange little bookshop in it is a richer, stranger, more connected place than one without.

So this week especially, try the simplest enchantment there is. Step through the door. Let the bell ring. And let someone who loves books help you find your next one.

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