Frightful Fiction Roundup: Our 31 Days to Halloween Countdown

By Amanda Pagan, Children's Librarian
October 30, 2019
Stavros Niarchos Foundation Library (SNFL)
Illustration of girl bobbing for apples, with the title Hallowe'en pleasures

Hallowe'en pleasures (1911). NYPL Digital Collections, Image ID: 1587790

Greetings, boos and ghouls! This fall, we celebrated 31 days of Halloween by sharing our selection of #FrightfulFiction across our social media accounts. Now, we’ve gathered all 31 titles here, into one frightfully fantastic list for you to check out all year round. (Summaries adapted from the publishers.)

The titles listed here are mainly horror with a few macabre non-fiction thrown in for variety, so there's something unnerving for everyone! 

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Without further adieu, we hope you enjoy these tales of horror, madness, and general spookiness! 
        

31 Book Recommendations from "31 Days to Halloween" Countdown

Something Wicked This Way Comes book cover

1. Something Wicked This Way Comes by Ray Bradbury

Two boys' lives are changed forever when a sinister travelling carnival stops at their Illinois town.
 

We Have Always Lived in the Castle book cover

2. We Have Always Lived in the Castle by Shirley Jackson

Six years after four family members died of arsenic poisoning, the three remaining Blackwoods—elder, agoraphobic sister Constance; wheelchair-bound Uncle Julian; and 18-year-old Mary Katherine, or, Merricat—live together in pleasant isolation. Merricat has developed an idiosyncratic system of rules and protective magic to guard the estate against intrusions from hostile villagers.

But one day, a stranger arrives—cousin Charles, with his eye on the Blackwood fortune—and manages to penetrate into their carefully shielded lives. Unable to drive him away by either polite or occult means, Merricat adopts more desperate methods, resulting in crisis, tragedy, and the revelation of a terrible secret.

Interview With the Vampire book cover

3. Interview with the Vampire by Anne Rice

Here are the confessions of a vampire. Hypnotic, shocking, and chillingly erotic, this is a novel of mesmerizing beauty and astonishing force—a story of danger and flight, of love and loss, of suspense and resolution, and of the extraordinary power of the senses. 

 

The Good House book cover

4. The Good House by Tananarive Due 

Working to rebuild her law practice after her son commits suicide, Angela Toussaint journeys to the family home where the suicide took place, hoping for answers, and discovers an evil force that is driving locals to acts of violence.

 

Rosemary's Baby book cover

5. Rosemary’s Baby by Ira Levin

Rosemary Woodhouse and her struggling actor husband, Guy, move into the Bramford, an old New York City apartment building with an ominous reputation and mostly elderly residents. Neighbors Roman and Minnie Castavet soon come nosing around to welcome the Woodhouses to the building and, despite Rosemary's reservations about their eccentricity and the weird noises she keeps hearing, Guy takes a special shine to them.

Shortly after Guy lands a plum Broadway role, Rosemary becomes pregnant, and the Castavets start taking a special interest in her welfare. As the sickened Rosemary becomes increasingly isolated, she begins to suspect that the Castavets' circle is not what it seems…
 

Beloved book cover

6. Beloved by Toni Morrison

Staring unflinchingly into the abyss of slavery, this spellbinding novel transforms history into a story as powerful as Exodus and as intimate as a lullaby. Sethe, its protagonist, was born a slave and escaped to Ohio but, 18 years later, she is still not free. She has too many memories of Sweet Home, the beautiful farm where so many hideous things happened. And Sethe's new home is haunted by the ghost of her baby, who died nameless and whose tombstone is engraved with a single word: Beloved. Filled with bitter poetry and suspense as taut as a rope, Beloved is a towering achievement. 
 

The Ghost Notebooks book cover

7. The Ghost Notebooks by Ben Dolnick

A supernatural story of love, ghosts, and madness as a young couple, newly engaged, become caretakers of a historic museum.

 

Stories book cover

8. Lovely, Dark, Deep: Stories  by Joyce Carol Oates 

A collection of 13 spellbinding stories that maps the eerie darkness within us all.

 

Gaywyck book cover

9. Gaywyck by Vincent Virga

A groundbreaking, gay Gothic romance and the first part of The Gaywyck Trilogy.

 

Carrie book cover

10. Carrie by Stephen King

A 16-year-old misfit, denied everything by her fanatical mother and abused by her classmates, unleashes her terrifying telekinetic powers on an entire town.

 

The Exorcist book cover

11. The Exorcist by William Peter Blatty

Four decades after it first shook the nation, then the world, William Peter Blatty's thrilling masterwork of faith and demonic possession returns in an even more powerful form. Raw and profane, shocking and blood-chilling, it remains a modern parable of good and evil, and perhaps the most terrifying novel ever written.

 

Mapping the Interior book cover

12. Mapping the Interior by Stephen Graham Jones

Walking through his own house at night, a 15-year-old thinks he sees another person stepping through a doorway. Instead of the people who could be there—his mother or his brother—the figure reminds him of his long-gone father, who died mysteriously before his family left the reservation. When he follows it, he discovers his house is bigger and deeper than he knew.

 

Stories book cover

13. Her Body and Other Parties by Carmen Maria Machado

Carmen Maria Machado blithely demolishes the arbitrary borders between psychological realism and science fiction, comedy and horror, fantasy and fabulism. While her work has earned her comparisons to Karen Russell and Kelly Link, she has a voice that is all her own. In this electric and provocative debut, Machado bends genre to shape startling narratives that map the realities of women’s lives and the violence visited upon their bodies.
 

Jane Steele book cover

14. Jane Steele by Lyndsay Faye

A sensitive orphan, Jane Steele suffers first at the hands of her spiteful aunt and predatory cousin, then at a grim school where she fights for her very life until escaping to London, leaving the corpses of her tormentors behind her. After years of hiding from the law while penning macabre "last confessions" of the recently hanged, Jane thrills at discovering an advertisement. Her aunt has died and her childhood home has a new master: Mr. Charles Thornfield, who seeks a governess.

Burning to know whether she is, in fact, the rightful heir, Jane takes the position incognito and learns that Highgate House is full of marvelously strange new residents—the fascinating but caustic Mr. Thornfield, an army doctor returned from the Sikh Wars; and the gracious Sikh butler, Mr. Sardar Singh, whose history with Mr. Thornfield appears far deeper and darker than they pretend. As Jane catches ominous glimpses of the pair’s violent history and falls in love with the gruffly tragic Mr. Thornfield, she faces a terrible dilemma: Can she possess him—body, soul, and secrets—without revealing her own murderous past?

Smoke Gets in Your Eyes & Other Lessons from the Crematory book cover

15. Smoke Gets in Your Eyes & Other Lessons from the Crematory by Caitlin Doughty

Armed with a degree in medieval history and a flair for the macabre, Caitlin Doughty took a job at a crematory and turned morbid curiosity into her life’s work. She cared for bodies of every color, shape, and affliction, and became an intrepid explorer in the world of the dead. In this best-selling memoir, brimming with gallows humor and vivid characters, she marvels at the gruesome history of undertaking, and relates her unique coming-of-age story with bold curiosity and mordant wit.
 

Certain Dark Things book cover

16. Certain Dark Things  by Silvia Moreno-Garcia

Welcome to Mexico City, an oasis in a sea of vampires. Here in the city, heavily policed to keep the creatures of the night at bay, Domingo is another trash-picking street kid, just hoping to make enough to survive. Then he meets Atl, the descendant of Aztec blood drinkers. Domingo is smitten. He clings to her like a barnacle until Atl relents and decides to let him stick around. But Atl's problems, Nick and Rodrigo, have come to find her. When they start to raise the body count in the city, it attracts the attention of police officers, local crime bosses, and the vampire community. Atl has to get out before Mexico City is upended, and her with it.
 

See What I Have Done book cover

17. See What I Have Done by Sarah Schmidt

On the morning of August 4, 1892, Lizzie Borden calls out to the maid: Someone's killed father. The brutal axe murder of Andrew and Abby Borden in their house in Fall River, Massachusetts ignites a series of domestic nightmares. From the outside, no one can understand why anyone would want to murder the respected Bordens. From the inside, sisters Lizzie and Emma have a different tale to tell. Both unmarried and intimately bound together in a stifling environment, they each struggle against their oppressive home life while longing for independence. 
 

The Tenth Girl book cover

18. The Tenth Girl  by Sara Faring

At the very southern tip of South America looms an isolated finishing school. Legend has it the land will curse those who settle there. But for Mavi—a bold Buenos Aires native fleeing the military regime that took her mother—it offers an escape to a new life as a young teacher to Argentina's elite girls.

Mavi tries to embrace the strangeness of the imposing house—despite warnings not to roam at night, threats from an enigmatic young man, and rumors of mysterious Others. But one of Mavi's 10 students is missing, and when students and teachers alike begin to behave as if possessed, the forces haunting this unholy cliff will no longer be ignored. One of these spirits holds a secret that could unravel Mavi's existence. In order to survive she must solve a cosmic mystery—and then fight for her life.

Deadly Women Throughout History

19. Lady Killers: Deadly Women Throughout Historyby Tori Telfer, illustrations by Dame Darcy

When you think of serial killers throughout history, the names that come to mind are ones like Jack the Ripper, John Wayne Gacy, and Ted Bundy. But what about Tillie Klimek, Moulay Hassan, and Kate Bender? The narrative we’re comfortable with is the one where women are the victims of violent crime, not the perpetrators. In fact, serial killers are thought to be so universally, overwhelmingly male that, in 1998, FBI profiler Roy Hazelwood infamously declared in a homicide conference, "There are no female serial killers."

Lady Killers, based on the popular online series that appeared on Jezebel and The Hairpin, disputes that claim, and offers 14 gruesome examples as evidence. Though largely forgotten by history, female serial killers such as Erzsébet Báthory, Nannie Doss, Mary Ann Cotton, and Darya Nikolayevna Saltykova rival their male counterparts in cunning, cruelty, and appetite for destruction.

The Devil in Silver book cover

20. The Devil in Silver: A Novel by Victor LaValle

Pepper is a rambunctious big man and, suddenly, the surprised inmate of a budget-strapped mental institution in Queens, New York. He's not mentally ill, but that doesn't seem to matter. On his first night, he's visited by a terrifying creature who nearly kills him before being hustled away by the hospital staff. It's no delusion: The other patients confirm that a hungry devil roams the hallways when the sun goes down. Pepper rallies three other inmates in a plot to fight back: Dorry, an octogenarian schizophrenic; Coffee, an African immigrant with severe OCD; and Loochie, a bipolar teenage girl. Battling the pill-pushing staff, one another, and their own minds, they try to kill the monster that's stalking them. But can the Devil die?
 

Eaters of the Dead book cover

21. Eaters of the Dead: The Manuscript of Ibn Fadlan, Relating His Experiences with the Northmen in A.D. 922 (previously published as The 13th Warrior) by Michael Crichton

It is 922 A.D. The refined Arab courtier Ibn Fadlan is accompanying a party of Viking warriors back to the north. Fadlan belatedly discovers that his job is to combat the terrors in the night that come to slaughter the Vikings—but just how he will do it, Fadlan has no idea.
 

The Supernatural Enhancements book cover

22. The Supernatural Enhancements: A Novel by Edgar Cantero

Months after the last of the Wells sons jumped out of his bedroom window in Axton House (incidentally, forgetting to open it first), a strange couple of Europeans arrive in Virginia to take possession of the estate. A. is the 23-year-old unforeseen scion; Niamh is the mute punk teen girl he refers to as his associate or bodyguard. Both are ready to settle into their new cushy lifestyle, and the rumors about the mansion being haunted add to their excitement. But ghosts are not in any way the deepest secret of the house.
 

A Graveyard for Lunatics book cover

23. A Graveyard for Lunatics by Ray Bradbury

Halloween Night, 1954. A young, film-obsessed scriptwriter has just been hired at one of the great studios. An anonymous investigation leads from the giant Maximus Films backlot to an eerie graveyard separated from the studio by a single wall. There, he makes a terrifying discovery that thrusts him into a maelstrom of intrigue and mystery—and into the dizzy exhilaration of the movie industry at the height of its glittering power.
 

Frankenstein in Baghdad book cover

24. Frankenstein in Baghdad: A Novel by Aḥmad Saʻdāwī

After he constructs a corpse from body parts found on the street, Hadi wants the government to prepare a proper burial. But when the corpse goes missing, a series of strange murders occur and Hadi realizes he has created a monster.
 

Marina book cover

25. Marina by Carlos Ruiz Zafon

While exploring Barcelona, boarding-school student Oscar Drai meets Marina, who takes him to a secret graveyard. There, they see a woman in black lay a rose on a gravestone and follow her into a world of forgotten secrets.
 

Fever Dream book cover

26. Fever Dream: A Novel by Samanta Schweblin

A young woman named Amanda lies dying in a rural hospital clinic. A boy named David sits beside her. She's not his mother. He's not her child. Together, they tell a haunting story of broken souls, toxins, and the power and desperation of family. Fever Dream is a nightmare come to life, a ghost story for the real world, a love story, and a cautionary tale.
 

Amatka book cover

27. Amatka by KarinTidbeck

A surreal and shockingly original debut novel set in a dystopian world shaped by language—literally. Vanja, a government worker, leaves her home city of Essre for the austere, wintry colony of Amatka on a research assignment. It takes some adjusting: people act differently in Amatka, and citizens are monitored for signs of subversion. Intending to stay just a short while, Vanja finds herself falling in love with her housemate, Nina, and decides to stick around. But when she stumbles on evidence of a growing threat to the colony and a cover-up by its administration, she begins an investigation that puts her at tremendous risk.
 

In a Glass Darkly book cover

28. In a Glass Darkly by Sheridan Le Fanu

In a Glass Darkly is a collection of five short stories by Sheridan Le Fanu, first published in 1872, the year before his death. The second and third are revised versions of previously published stories, and the fourth and fifth are long enough to be called novellas.

 

The Alphabet House book cover

29.  The Alphabet House by Jussi Alder-Olsen, translated by Steve Schein

Conducting a special photo-reconnaissance mission in World War II Dresden, two British pilots are shot down and try to escape on an SS senior soldier train, only to land in a mental hospital where patients are subjected to experimental therapies.
 

The Hunger book cover

30. The Hunger by Alma Katsu

Evil is invisible, and it is everywhere.

That is the only way to explain the series of misfortunes that have plagued the wagon train known as the Donner Party. Depleted rations, bitter quarrels, and the mysterious death of a little boy have driven the isolated travelers to the brink of madness. Though they dream of what awaits them in the West, long-buried secrets begin to emerge, and dissent among them escalates to the point of murder and chaos. They cannot seem to escape tragedy… or the feelings that someone—or something—is stalking them.
 

The Legend of Sleepy Hollow book cover

31. The Legend of Sleepy Hallow by Washington Irving

A superstitious schoolmaster, in love with a wealthy farmer's daughter, has a terrifying encounter with a headless horseman.