15 Halloween Books So Scary, They’ll Keep You Up For the Rest of the Year – Yahoo! Voices

Prepare your night-lights.

From House Beautiful

15 Halloween Books So Scary, They'll Keep You Up For the Rest of the Year

Halloween is the best time of year and the very best holiday for many reasons, from the over-the-top, elaborate costumes (who doesn't love an excuse to play dress up?) and the surplus of sweets to the spirited decorations and the fall-tastic activities like apple pickingbut the real Hallow's Eve treat? Scary stories. We rounded up fifteen horror novels, thrillers, fantasies full of ghosts, goblins, witches, and supernatural beings for the ultimate library reading list of Halloween books to get you in the spirit. Though some are October 31st-specific, these books will keep you up at night all year long.

1) The Haunting of Hill House

No Halloween reading list is complete without Shirley Jackson's seminal book, The Haunting of Hill House. Arguably the best literary ghost story ever written, it follows four strangersan occult scholar, his assistant, a troubled woman with a history of supernatural encounters, and the soon-to-be heir of the houseas they convene in notorious Hill House. You'll get all the unnerving haunted house tropes you're craving around Halloween, but with a literary twist.

ORDER NOW

2) White Is For Witching

It's not surprising that award-winning writer Helen Oyeyemi's latest novel is a tour de forceand it happens to be about an anthropomorphic house with a mean streak towards outsiders and newcomers.

ORDER NOW

3) Aura

If you appreciate Magical Realism in all its supernatural-meets-hyperrealist blended glory but don't have the attention or time to read a bible-sized novel right now, pick up Aura. Carlos Fuentes' novella may be slim in size but it is a force to be reckoned with. If you read it allegorically, it explores the violent colonial past in Mexico and the ways in which it haunts the present collective consciousness. On the surface, it's also just a fun ghost mystery.

ORDER NOW

4) Dark Harvest

Winner of the Bram Stoker award, Norman Partridge's Dark Harvest is a contemporary novel that explores the underbelly of American folklore, town gossip, community think, and more. It follows a generic midwest town in which everyone is obsessed with a menacing figure of a little boy with a weapon who emerges annually on Halloween night in the cornfields. Find out what happens when our protagonist tries to defeat him once and for all.

ORDER NOW

5) Frankenstein

Let this year be the year you finally read the origin story behind everyone's favorite Halloween costume. Mary Shelley's brilliant novel is about the limitations and boundaries of science, as well as humankind's pursuit of control and dominance over nature and all the danger it accompanies.

ORDER NOW

6) Beloved

Though not technically a Halloween book, Toni Morrison's Beloved is hands down one of the powerful and transformative ghost stories ever written. But it's much more than just a ghost story, revealing the persistent remnants of slavery's legacy that haunt the country throughout the Reconstruction and into the present. It also reads like a love story in many ways, exploring the power of romantic, maternal, platonic, and self-love. Definitely required reading, Halloween or not.

ORDER NOW

7) Complete Short Stories of Edgar Allen Poe

Who knew a poem could be so scary? And we're not talking about the flashbacks to high school English class that may accompany them. If you haven't read Edgar Allen Poe's dark stories and poems, give this a go.

ORDER NOW

8) Her Body and Other Parties

If you haven't read this short collection by Carmen Maria Machado, you are in for a serious treat. Machado's writing is spellbindind and biting, at once entertaining and profoundly thought-provoking. All of the stories are a mix of eerie, erotic, absurd, and all will stay with you long after you've finished the last sentence. One story is a string of disjoined of passages, each a fan fiction reimagining of an episode of Law & Order: Special Victims Unit and another, "The Husband Stitch" is a contemporary take (complete with resonant social critiquing) on the classic children's folklore "The Girl With the Green Ribbon." Each one is a feminist feat blending science fiction, fantasy, horror, humor, and more.

ORDER NOW

9) The Picture of Dorian Gray

Hedonism, vanity, and narcism: What trio could be freakier? In this harrowing gothic and philosophical tale (and Oscar Wilde's only published novel), our protagonist sinks into the darkest sides of elite 18th-century British society as he becomes increasingly obsessed with prizing aesthetic beauty, youth, and pleasure above all else. How is this related to Halloween, you skeptics ask? The haunting portrait with a life of its owns is at the crux of the novel, for starters.

ORDER NOW

10) The Legend of Sleepy Hollow

So you love Halloween and want to get in the spirit but don't really feel like sleeping with a night-light on for the foreseeable future... In that case, opt for a classic like The Legend of Sleepy Hollow by Washington Irving. Slightly unnerving and full of creepy imagery but ultimately not a haunt-you-until-your-last-living-breath kind of read.

ORDER NOW

11) Little Sister Death

William Gay's Little Sister Death follows a young author who can't seem to shake his writer's block until he seeks inspiration from an old ghost story in the American South. The book delves into a violent past, deeply disturbed characters, and plenty of southern gothic doom and gloom.

ORDER NOW

12) Fledgling

Octavia E. Butler's Fledgling is not your everyday vampire flick. Well, it is in the sense that's impossible to put down and you could easily read it one sitting, but also wrestles with polemic issues of race, sexuality, and identity. The protagonists, language, themes, and plot are all nothing short of riveting.

ORDER NOW

13) The Turn of the Screw

Henry James is one of the true masters when it comes to telling terrifying tales. As its moniker implies, the horror is only amplified by the slow build and increasing anticipation. Like most of the scariest stories, The Turn of the Screw is set on a remote, shadowy, and expansive estate occupied by a governess and two the children she cares for. As tension and tragedy mounts, so do the hauntingsreal or imagined.

ORDER NOW

14) Dead Girls and Other Stories

In her debut collection Dead Girls and Other Stories, Emily Geminder introduces us to a cast of unsavory and/or doomed women who are all meet their demise in some tragic fashion. Each short story is written in a lyrical, meditative way that will leave you feeling moved, creeped out, and at times, outraged.

ORDER NOW

15) Dracula

If you rolled your eyes when I said Frankenstein was everyone's favorite Halloween costume and monster, don't worry, I didn't forget about Dracula. Go out with a bang with Bram Stoker's Dracula, the grandfather of all the vampire fantasy franchises we have subsequently been blessed with. If you love a gothic novel in all its macabre and moody glory, this is for you.

ORDER NOW

Read the original post:
15 Halloween Books So Scary, They'll Keep You Up For the Rest of the Year - Yahoo! Voices

Reviewed and Recommended by Erik Baquero