I find autumn to be the perfect time for horror novels, and I’m not the only one! Even those of us who read spooky books all year round enjoy the atmosphere of doing so when the night starts to come early and the wind gets chilly, when we can look out our windows and see flickering lights through the darkness. However you like your horror- bloody or bloodless, classic or new- there’s a great book out there to suit your mood.
Starting with the gothic, a genre all about decaying glamor and philosophical secrets, you can’t go wrong with Frankenstein. If you’ve never read it before, prepare to have your heart break for the hideous creature who turned his rage on the world that did not love him, and perhaps even for the scientist who made a creature who frightened him too much to love. For a more modern look at forbidden knowledge and fallen nobility, take a look at Mexican Gothic. Noemí goes to visit her beloved cousin and her sinister in-laws, only to find a castle of a house with a serious mushroom infestation. Something very evil is hidden in these halls- maybe only just beneath the wallpaper…
If autumn and Halloween mean ghosts to you, you’re in luck- some of the best genre writers working today have felt the same way. A Head Full of Ghosts tells the terrifyingly ambiguous narrative of a ghost-hunting reality show that went horribly wrong, and the family it took down with it. But just which member of the family was responsible for the tragedy, and what sources could have driven them to it? Meanwhile, in How to Sell a Haunted House, estranged siblings grudgingly come together to clear out their mother’s terrifying collection of puppets- but the thing they’ll really have to clean out isn't your average haunted doll. Their mother didn’t just leave behind uncanny marionettes, but familial trauma that nobody was supposed to talk about.
What if you want to be scared by something weirder, in a genre of its own? There’s nothing else quite like Uzumaki, the bizarrely grotesque manga about a town haunted by an abstract shape- spirals. There’s nowhere to escape something so abstract- there are even spirals inside the human body. Streets curl, hair moves on its own, people are moved to violence, and the hideous yet beautiful illustrations carry the story onward, as each calamity circles back to the same theme…kind of like a spiral.
Whatever your favorite scary book is, we wish you a happy Halloween and a cozy autumn. Set a pile of books beside your bed, and hope you’ll be able to sleep when you put them down!