Spooky Books our Staff Love

All Hallows Read is a world-wide event celebrating the delights of sharing scary stories. It coincides with Hallowe’en. Being spooked can be fun when you have someone to hold on to!

In the Library this month we are displaying books in a range of scary genres – mysteries, horror, gothic, crime – for you to check out. Our staff have some specific recommendations below.

So grab a book, grab a friend, and turn on your reading light in a darkened room …

Dracula by Bram Stoker. View Record in IvyCat

Ann Spinney recommends this because while the story is scary, Stoker’s descriptive passages of moonlight on mountains and other natural scenes are ravishing. It is all very much in the Romantic era style. We also have the Illustrated Junior Library edition of this classic in our collection.

The Skeleton Haunts a House. A Family Skeleton Mystery, Book 3. By Leigh Perry. View Free Kindle Preview

Diana Dudley recommends this one. Sid the Skeleton lives with the family of an adjunct professor. No one knows how he came alive again, but now that he is re-animated, he takes an interest in solving the mysterious deaths of others. On a visit (in costume, of course) to a Halloween Haunted House with his family, Sid is accidentally trapped inside when the police close the place down to investigate an actual dead body. Sid does some investigating of his own.

Diana also recommends Joyland and Duma Key by Stephen King – “they are not too spooky.”

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Coraline by Neil Gaiman View Record in IvyCat

The Graveyard Book by Neil Gaiman. View Record in IvyCat

Liz Metz recommends these two young adult fantasy books by the masterful Neil Gaiman. They are in our Juvenile Fiction collection.

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UnSub and Into the Black Nowhere by Meg Gardiner. View record for UnSub in IvyCat

Nicole Treesh writes, “The spookiest books I’ve enjoyed recently are crime thrillers by Meg Gardiner – UnSub books 1 and 2. The first, UnSub, is inspired by the real Zodiac Killer. It follows ‘a young detective determined to apprehend the serial murderer who destroyed her family and terrorized a city twenty years earlier’ (book jacket). It is in our fiction collection. The second, Into the Black Nowhere, is based on the real-life case of Ted Bundy, ‘an exhilarating thriller in which FBI profiler Caitlin Hendrix faces off against a charming, merciless serial killer’ (book jacket). It is in our Baker & Taylor fiction collection.”