It’s Halloween (or rather, Samhain Night), and I cannot resist dipping into something spooky! Here are the spookiest reads lurking in my library, organised into specific “flavours” of spooky, like 90’s Kid spooky, sexy spooky, thrilling spooky, etc. I’d also love it if you would share your favourite horror/gothic/scary books—and movies—in the Comments below!

90s Kid Spooky

Is R.L. Stine still a big deal for teen readers today? In my day, you could not go into any bookstore without seeing whole shelves of R.L. Stine series—and the man is prolific! I did not really enjoy the Goosebumps series—was a bit too old for it by the time I started buying Stine books I suppose—but the Fear Street Saga! Now there was something that fell right in the centre of my romance/horror/historical fiction Venn diagrams…

I must say the series published by Simon Pulse in the 90s had better covers—or maybe this is my nostalgia grumbling.

What’s between the covers, though, is still fun even if I’m reading this two decades later. Do I now spot trite and downright cringey language? Are the plot holes still as massive? Yes, but the stories are entertaining. A family cursed generation after generation by dark magic, explosive human passions—yes please! Strongly recommended if you’d like a nostalgia hit or a stress-free, fun read!

Sexy Spooky

My favourite novelist of all time is Anne Rice. And one of my favourite books of hers is *The Mummy*. The premise is simple: the famous Ramses II develops a potion of immortality—true immortality. As in, you *cannot* die even if your body is smashed to bits immortality. Disillusioned by his attempt to turn his lover (Cleopatra VII—yes, *her*) into a being such as himself, he goes into a centuries long slumber, only waking up when a team of Edwardian Egyptologists stumble into his “tomb.” Much adventure—a good portion sexy—ensues.
*The Mummy* deals with themes similar to those in the Vampire Chronicles—the ambivalence of immortality, the loneliness of the human condition, the inability of society to accept difference, etc. And Rice is always on point when it comes to creating attractive characters. But *The Mummy* has some images/moments which blow the other books out of the water—or should I say crypt? Just one example: Ramses feeding his potion of immortality to cattle because he had the bright idea to create an *eternal supply of food*. The problem was, even cut up and cooked, the meat of the slaughtered cattle somehow *remained alive*. The scene where Ramses discovers this, as the people he fed the meat to start falling sick, is truly disturbing. And this is just a tiny, throwaway moment in a book full of such moments!

Sexy Spooky – Vampire Version

Ok, so Anne Rice is appearing twice, but really, *Interview with the Vampire, The Vampire Lestat, and The Queen of the Damned* are seminal works in modern vampire fiction. These aren’t spooky per se, but they are Halloween reads because of their atmosphere and themes. And no, please, please do not make any comparisons between this series and *Twilight*. *Twilight* is to this series what Kraft cheese is to actual cheese sourced from some artisan farmer in the highest reaches of the Alps.

More so than *The Mummy*, I’d say this is a NSFW series, because it deals even more obviously with behaviours deemed deviant by many traditional societies and groups. But really, the glaring shock factor aside, I’ve always thought the vampires Rice presents could really also be a metaphor for growing up. Your body is changing or has changed, you don’t understand why life feels different now, people are pressurising you to behave in different ways—sometimes in ways contrary to how you want to live your life, but you’re not sure how to say no because you’re still dependent on them… There is even a vampire who’s stuck in a little girl’s body. Forever.
Is Rice’s writing verbose? Yes. But it’s verbose in the way a tropical jungle might look dense compared to, say, a rigidly organised plantation—luxuriant and tangled in glorious ways. If you read nothing else on this list, please pick these up and give them a try!

Thrilling Spooky

After I read this next book, I literally, genuinely felt uncomfortable any time my spine was not protected by a wall. Relic by Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child (I know, interesting, a publishing duo!) is a fast-paced thriller about the discovery of an Ancient Evil lurking in the Museum of Natural History in NYC. Unsurprisingly, this Ancient Evil has a taste for murder. How do spines figure in all this? Pick up the book—there are physical copies in multiple NLB libraries, or you can borrow the ebook via the NLBMobile app—and you’ll see.

It's a doorstopper of a book, but it never feels like a long read because the action moves rapidly and each shocking moment is quickly topped by a still more shocking moment. The authors also use multiple perspectives to great effect: the reader sort of feels like they’re a bystander at the corner of a building, able to see two people walking along, unaware that they’re on a collision course—but being unable to do anything except watch in fascinated horror as they head toward their inevitable doom.

This book is also notable as it’s the first time we meet the character who will become Preston and Child’s most well known “detective”: Agent AXL Pendergast. If you like larger than life, almost anime-style, superhuman type characters, you’ll like Pendergast.

Witty Spooky

Just look at the front and back covers of this book!

This is Horrorstör, by Grady Hendrix. The chapter titles, too, are designed to look like something out of the catalogue of a certain very famous DIY furniture store—except, as the story develops, and our protagonist discovers more and more frightening facts about the store in which she works, the furniture on the chapter title pages starts morphing into something altogether darker.

I bought this book for its cover, and kept reading for its satirical take on today’s consumerism and live-to-work culture. The writing’s not pretty, but it’s smooth and clear. Did it evoke a spooky vibe? Occasionally, but really, I’d say the draw of this book is its wit more than its ability to scare or unsettle me.

Sticks in the Mind Spooky

Sheridan Le Fanu was an Irish writer who seems little known today, despite writing the (in)famous Carmilla, a vampire story with lesbian undertones, a full 26 years before Bram Stoker published Dracula. But it’s not Carmilla I’m recommending (the writing seems oddly overwrought, and the plot stretches belief once too often), but his even less well known “Green Tea.”

I first encountered this story as part of a collection, titled In a Glass Darkly. All these stories are absolutely terrifying, but “Green Tea” stands out because of the simple question it asks: if you can see something, might that something not be able to see you too? A very simple question, but haunting in its ramifications.

You can read the entirety of the story here. And if you liked it, definitely get the entire collection!

Classic Spooky

Possibly the most well known (Anglophone) vampire novel in the world, Dracula by Bram Stoker is another must read. The titular character and story have been reinterpreted in so many ways in succeeding decades that you might be surprised at how the original actually goes heavy on the terror and unease, and light on the romantic/sexy/cool/antihero nature of the vampire. I also know there’s an expurgated and rewritten version going about which rewrites the entire novel as a straightforward third person narrative—which is a travesty.

Because one of the great things about the original novel is the way you the reader have to piece together the story from diaries, ship records, newspaper reports, etc. In other words, we could say that Bram Stoker mastered the written equivalent of “found footage” storytelling a century before the genre really exploded in cinemas. And just like a theatregoer being absolutely terrified because what’s unfolding on the screen feels so real and immediate, so the reader of Dracula is drawn into the world Stoker evokes. It feels like everything’s happening, right there, right then. (This is called an epistolary style, by the way).

Isn’t the cover of this Puffin Classics edition absolutely gorgeous, by the way? This is the Dracula as pictured in the novel: bestial, horrifying, but absolutely, electrically memorable.

Straight Up Terrifying

I don’t have a picture of Relic because I lost a bunch of books to a termite infestation years ago. But this book I threw away because I was so frightened after reading it; just looking at the cover made me feel weird. This story is also, by now, a really famous movie franchise, and the movies are known for being absolutely terrifying. There are, in fact, franchises in both the original Japanese, and Hollywood versions.

Any guesses as to what book this is?

This is Ring by Koji Suzuki. It’s actually the first book in a trilogy (the second is also quite scary, but the third is just… odd) and the author does an amazing job of building an atmosphere of intense dread, which finally turns to sharp terror.

It doesn’t help that I probably watched the original Japanese film version of The Ring too young, and now the imagery is stuck in my head. But the novel itself is packed with deceptively simple, yet deeply unsettling imagery. It’s odd: the writing is very, very simple and understated, but the dread and fear evoked is unbelievable. (And I’m reading an English translation—what must the original be like?!)

Of all the books I’m recommending, this is the one I feel I should slap a warning label on. If you’re susceptible to scary imagery sticking in your head, best avo

The spookiest reads on my shelf.