October has a reading list of its own. Some readers want a book that makes them check the locks twice. Others want fog, candlelight and a ghost who mostly keeps to the attic.
This list covers both. The fourteen books are grouped by mood. Each one comes with its length, its tropes and a plain answer to how scary it is. If you want the ones that cost people sleep, we covered those in ten horror books that are actually terrifying. None of them repeat here.
One more thing before the books. Seekquel's Spooky Season runs from October 1 to 31. Finish three horror books in that window and the Witching Hour theme stays on your account for good. Every book below says whether it counts.
Start on the first of October
A Night in the Lonesome October by Roger Zelazny
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A Night in the Lonesome October
- Length: about 280 pages
- Tropes: talking animals, secret contest, countdown to Halloween, gothic cameos
- How scary: playful, with a chill at the edges
- Spooky Season: counts
Snuff is a watchdog. His owner is a man named Jack who carries a knife and takes long walks through foggy London. Snuff tells the story as a diary, one entry for each night from October 1 to October 31.
That structure is why readers treat it as an annual ritual: one chapter a night, finishing on Halloween. Snuff and a group of other animal companions are sizing each other up for something planned for the last night of the month. Figures you'll recognize from Victorian horror drift through, and Gahan Wilson's drawings sit between the chapters.
Gothic houses with something wrong inside
Mexican Gothic by Silvia Moreno-Garcia
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Mexican Gothic
- Length: about 300 pages
- Tropes: isolated mansion, sinister in-laws, creeping rot, 1950s Mexico
- How scary: slow dread, then body horror
- Spooky Season: counts
Noemí Taboada is a Mexico City socialite who would rather be at a party. Then a frantic letter arrives from her newly married cousin. Her father sends her to High Place, a crumbling mansion in the mountains, to find out what is going on.
The family who own it forbid talking at dinner and hold unpleasant views on bloodlines. The walls are damp and something grows in them. It won the Locus Award for Best Horror Novel, and the final act earns the body horror warning.
We Have Always Lived in the Castle by Shirley Jackson
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We Have Always Lived in the Castle
- Length: about 150 pages
- Tropes: unreliable narrator, sisters against the world, poisoning, hostile village
- How scary: unsettling, never gory
- Spooky Season: counts
Six years ago, most of the Blackwood family died after arsenic turned up in the sugar bowl. Eighteen-year-old Merricat, her sister Constance and their Uncle Julian are what's left. They live behind a locked gate while the village children chant rhymes about them.
Merricat narrates, and half the pleasure is deciding how much of what she says to believe. It was the last novel Jackson finished. You can read it in a weekend, and it will stay with you much longer.
Haunted houses (and one hotel)
The Shining by Stephen King
- Length: about 450 pages
- Tropes: snowed-in hotel, family coming apart, psychic child, isolation
- How scary: properly frightening
- Spooky Season: counts
Jack Torrance takes a winter job as caretaker of the Overlook Hotel, high in the Colorado Rockies. He brings his wife Wendy and their five-year-old son Danny. Then the snow closes the road.
Danny has the shining, a gift for seeing what a place remembers, and the Overlook remembers a great deal. King spends as long on Jack's drinking and temper as he does on the ghosts. The hotel only has to find the crack that's already there.
How to Sell a Haunted House by Grady Hendrix
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How to Sell a Haunted House
- Length: about 430 pages
- Tropes: estranged siblings, creepy puppets, grief, family secrets
- How scary: funny until it suddenly isn't
- Spooky Season: counts
When their parents die in a car accident, Louise flies home to Charleston. She has to clear out the house with her brother Mark, who she barely speaks to. The place is packed with their late mother's puppets and dolls. One puppet, Pupkin, does not want the house sold.
Hendrix writes the sibling fights as sharply as the scares. This is the book on the list most likely to make you laugh out loud, shortly before you check a closet.
Folk horror and old curses
The Only Good Indians by Stephen Graham Jones
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The Only Good Indians
- Length: about 320 pages
- Tropes: revenge, a past act coming back, friendship, something hunting
- How scary: tense, and gruesome in places
- Spooky Season: counts
Years ago, four young Blackfeet men went hunting in an area set aside for their elders and did something they shouldn't have. Now, one by one, something is coming for them.
It won the Bram Stoker Award for best novel. The horror is sharp, but Jones gives just as much weight to guilt, family and what these friends owe each other. That's why the ending hurts.
HEX by Thomas Olde Heuvelt
- Length: about 380 pages
- Tropes: cursed town, witch, surveillance, small-town cruelty
- How scary: creeping, then brutal
- Spooky Season: counts
Black Spring, New York, has a resident witch. She died in the 1600s, and her eyes and mouth are sewn shut. She turns up in living rooms and at bus stops and simply stands there. The town tracks her with an app and hides her from visitors.
Anyone born in Black Spring can't stay away for long. Then a group of bored teenagers decide to test the rules. Olde Heuvelt first published it in Dutch and moved the setting to America for the English edition.
Spooky, but not scary
The Legend of Sleepy Hollow by Washington Irving
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The Legend of Sleepy Hollow
- Length: about 50 pages
- Tropes: headless horseman, love rivals, small-town legend, open ending
- How scary: barely, it's a comic tale
- Spooky Season: counts
Ichabod Crane is a lanky schoolmaster with a big appetite and a bigger belief in ghost stories. He courts the heiress Katrina Van Tassel in a quiet Hudson Valley hollow. His rival, Brom Bones, knows exactly which story scares him most.
Irving published it in 1820, and it is funnier than its reputation. The ending leaves you to decide what really happened on the road that night. At about 50 pages, it's the quickest book on this list to count toward Spooky Season.
Something Wicked This Way Comes by Ray Bradbury
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Something Wicked This Way Comes
- Length: under 300 pages
- Tropes: sinister carnival, best friends, coming of age, wishes with a price
- How scary: shivery more than frightening
- Spooky Season: counts
A carnival arrives in Green Town, Illinois, in the middle of the night, a week before Halloween. Thirteen-year-old best friends Will Halloway and Jim Nightshade go to look. Cooger & Dark's Pandemonium Shadow Show can give people what they secretly want, and it always collects.
Will's father, who works nights at the town library, becomes the unlikely hero. Bradbury's sentences are the reason to read it. Almost every page has a line worth reading twice.
Practical Magic by Alice Hoffman
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Practical Magic
- Length: about 290 pages
- Tropes: family of witches, sisters, family curse, small town
- How scary: not at all
- Spooky Season: doesn't count (it isn't tagged horror)
Sally and Gillian Owens are raised by their aunts in a small Massachusetts town. The town has blamed their family for everything for two hundred years. Any man an Owens woman loves dies young, so both sisters try to outrun the family gift.
It's warm, witchy and sad in places. It won't move your Spooky Season count, which makes it a good pick for the week you need a break from the horror.
Short enough for one night
What Moves the Dead by T. Kingfisher
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What Moves the Dead
- Length: about 165 pages
- Tropes: Poe retelling, decaying manor, creepy fungus, animals acting wrong
- How scary: creepy, and a bit gross
- Spooky Season: counts
Alex Easton, a retired soldier, rides to the Usher family home after hearing that their childhood friend Madeline is dying. The house sits beside a dark lake, the hares move strangely, and there are mushrooms everywhere.
It retells Poe's "The Fall of the House of Usher," with a sharp British mycologist along for the ride. Easton's dry voice keeps it funny right up to the point where it stops being funny.
Carmilla by Sheridan Le Fanu
- Length: about 110 pages
- Tropes: vampire, mysterious guest, forbidden attraction, lonely castle
- How scary: atmospheric and slow
- Spooky Season: counts
A carriage overturns outside a lonely castle in Styria. A beautiful young woman is left in the care of Laura and her father. The guest sleeps all day and won't say where she comes from. She grows very attached to Laura, and girls in the villages nearby start to die.
It came out in 1872, twenty-five years before Dracula, and set the pattern for the female vampire. You can finish it in an evening.
The Ballad of Black Tom by Victor LaValle
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The Ballad of Black Tom
- Length: about 150 pages
- Tropes: cosmic horror, Lovecraft retelling, hustler hero, 1920s New York
- How scary: cosmic dread with a hard edge
- Spooky Season: counts
Charles Thomas Tester hustles around Harlem to keep a roof over his father's head. Then he delivers an occult book to a sorceress in Queens, and draws the attention of things far older than the city.
LaValle revisits Lovecraft's story "The Horror at Red Hook" through the eyes of a Black New Yorker. It won the Shirley Jackson Award for best novella.
The Turn of the Screw by Henry James
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The Turn of the Screw
- Length: about 120 pages
- Tropes: governess, haunted children, unreliable narrator, country house
- How scary: quietly, and it lingers
- Spooky Season: counts
A young governess takes a post at Bly, a country house, caring for two orphaned children, Miles and Flora. She starts seeing a man and a woman on the grounds who shouldn't be there. Soon she's sure the children see them too.
Readers have argued about whether the ghosts are real since 1898. James never settles it, and that's why it still works.
Three books, and a theme to keep
The Spooky Season card is on your Home screen now. Tap Join the goal, then finish three books tagged horror between October 1 and 31. Gothic, folk horror and haunted house books all count.
Finish, and the Witching Hour theme is yours for good. Pro can't buy it, so it only goes to readers who finish.
Short on time? What Moves the Dead, Carmilla and The Ballad of Black Tom come to about 425 pages together. That's the whole goal in one long weekend.
