“Spooky Season” Reading Recommendations

Good day, my bookish peeps. If you’ve followed me for any time now, you’ve probably noticed that I have several favorite genres: romance, mystery, suspense, thrillers, and romantic suspense. I do read from other genres, like science fiction, fantasy, and horror, but these aren’t my standard go-tos.

However, since we’re in the middle of “Spooky Season,” I thought I might recommend a few of my favorite spooky reads. Some are horror, some are what I consider psychological horror, and some have horror elements (or at least they do in my mind). Some are old (including what is considered the first horror novel and if you haven’t read the original do it please; the movie adaptations don’t do it justice) and the others are more recent releases.

Frankenstein: The 1818 Text by Mary Shelley
ISBN: 9780143131847 (paperback)
ISBN: 9781524705701 (eBook)
ISBN: 9781400176342 (Audiobook)
ASIN: B00FQS5BBO (Audible Audiobook)
ASIN: B071NCSKSP (Kindle edition)
Publisher: Penguin Classics
Release Date: 1818

“Now that I had finished, the beauty of the dream vanished, and breathless horror and disgust filled my heart…”

For the bicentennial of its first publication, Mary Shelley’s original 1818 text, introduced by National Book Critics Circle award-winner Charlotte Gordon. Nominated as one of America’s best-loved novels by PBS’s The Great American Read

2018 marks the bicentennial of Mary Shelley’s seminal novel. For the first time, Penguin Classics will publish the original 1818 text, which preserves the hard-hitting and politically-charged aspects of Shelley’s original writing, as well as her unflinching wit and strong female voice. This edition also emphasizes Shelley’s relationship with her mother—trailblazing feminist Mary Wollstonecraft, who penned A Vindication of the Rights of Woman—and demonstrates her commitment to carrying forward her mother’s ideals, placing her in the context of a feminist legacy rather than the sole female in the company of male poets, including Percy Shelley and Lord Byron.

This edition includes a new introduction and suggestions for further reading by National Book Critics Circle award-winner and Shelley expert Charlotte Gordon, literary excerpts and reviews selected by Gordon, and a chronology and essay by preeminent Shelley scholar Charles E. Robinson.

Lone Women by Victor LaValle
ISBN: 9780525512080 (Hardcover)
ISBN: 9780525512097 (ebook)
ISBN: 9780593611050 (digital audiobook)
ASIN: B0B648K358 (Audible audiobook)
ASIN: B0B4R7NMQ7 (Kindle edition)
Publisher: One World
Release Date: March 28, 2023

Blue skies, empty land—and enough room to hide away a horrifying secret. Or is there? Discover a haunting new vision of the American West from the award-winning author of The Changeling.

Adelaide Henry carries an enormous steamer trunk with her wherever she goes. It’s locked at all times. Because when the trunk opens, people around Adelaide start to disappear.

The year is 1915, and Adelaide is in trouble. Her secret sin killed her parents, forcing her to flee California in a hellfire rush and make her way to Montana as a homesteader. Dragging the trunk with her at every stop, she will become one of the “lone women” taking advantage of the government’s offer of free land for those who can tame it—except that Adelaide isn’t alone. And the secret she’s tried so desperately to lock away might be the only thing that will help her survive the harsh territory.

Crafted by a modern master of magical suspense, Lone Women blends shimmering prose, an unforgettable cast of adventurers who find horror and sisterhood in a brutal landscape, and a portrait of early-twentieth-century America like you’ve never seen. And at its heart is the gripping story of a woman desperate to bury her past—or redeem it.

The Fervor by Alma Katsu
ISBN: 9780593328354 (paperback - released September 5, 2023)
ISBN: 9780593328347 (ebook)
ISBN: 9780593552421 (digital audiobook)
ASIN: B09FW9G5ZX (Audible audiobook)
ASIN: B09B8NJS8C (Kindle edition)
Publisher: G.P. Putnam’s Sons
Release Date: April 26, 2022

The acclaimed author of the celebrated literary horror novels The Hunger and The Deep turns her psychological and supernatural eye to the horrors of the Japanese American internment camps during World War II.

1944: As World War II rages on, the threat has come to the home front. In a remote corner of Idaho, Meiko Briggs and her daughter, Aiko, are desperate to return home. Following Meiko’s husband’s enlistment as an air force pilot in the Pacific months prior, Meiko and Aiko were taken from their home in Seattle and sent to one of the internment camps in the Midwest. It didn’t matter that Aiko was American-born: They were Japanese, and therefore considered a threat by the American government.

Mother and daughter attempt to hold on to elements of their old life in the camp when a mysterious disease begins to spread among those interned. What starts as a minor cold quickly becomes spontaneous fits of violence and aggression, even death. And when a disconcerting team of doctors arrive, nearly more threatening than the illness itself, Meiko and her daughter team up with a newspaper reporter and widowed missionary to investigate, and it becomes clear that something more sinister is afoot, a demon from the stories of Meiko’s childhood, hell-bent on infiltrating their already strange world.

Inspired by the Japanese yōkai and the jorōgumo spider demon, The Fervor explores the horrors of the supernatural beyond just the threat of the occult. With a keen and prescient eye, Katsu crafts a terrifying story about the danger of demonization, a mysterious contagion, and the search to stop its spread before it’s too late. A sharp account of too-recent history, it’s a deep excavation of how we decide who gets to be human when being human matters most.

The Hunger by Alma Katsu
ISBN: 9780735212534 (paperback - Released March 5, 2019)
ISBN: 9780735212527 (ebook)
ISBN: 9780525527688 (digital audiobook)
ASIN: B07B4GRN6H (Audible audiobook)
ASIN: B071X2K32P (Kindle edition)
Publisher: G.P. Putnam’s Sons
Release Date: March 6, 2018

Evil is invisible, and it is everywhere.

Tamsen Donner must be a witch. 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 pioneers to the brink of madness. They cannot escape the feeling that someone—or something—is stalking them. Whether it was a curse from the beautiful Tamsen, the choice to follow a disastrous experimental route West, or just plain bad luck—the 90 men, women, and children of the Donner Party are at the brink of one of the deadliest and most disastrous western adventures in American history.

While the ill-fated group struggles to survive in the treacherous mountain conditions—searing heat that turns the sand into bubbling stew; snows that freeze the oxen where they stand—evil begins to grow around them, and within them. As members of the party begin to disappear, they must ask themselves “What if there is something waiting in the mountains? Something disturbing and diseased…and very hungry?”

The Fireman by Joe Hill
ISBN: 9780062200648 (Paperback - released on January 3, 2017)
ISBN: 9780062200655 (ebook)
ISBN: 9780062443779 (digital audiobook)
ASIN: B01COQZWTQ (Audible audiobook)
ASIN: B013C5M08O (Kindle edition)
Publisher: William Morrow
Release Date: May 17, 2016

From the award-winning, New York Times bestselling author of NOS4A2 and Heart-Shaped Box comes a chilling novel about a worldwide pandemic of spontaneous combustion that threatens to reduce civilization to ashes and a band of improbable heroes who battle to save it, led by one powerful and enigmatic man known as the Fireman.

The fireman is coming. Stay cool.

No one knows exactly when it began or where it originated. A terrifying new plague is spreading like wildfire across the country, striking cities one by one: Boston, Detroit, Seattle. The doctors call it Draco Incendia Trychophyton. To everyone else it’s Dragonscale, a highly contagious, deadly spore that marks its hosts with beautiful black and gold marks across their bodies—before causing them to burst into flames. Millions are infected; blazes erupt everywhere. There is no antidote. No one is safe.

Harper Grayson, a compassionate, dedicated nurse as pragmatic as Mary Poppins, treated hundreds of infected patients before her hospital burned to the ground. Now she’s discovered the telltale gold-flecked marks on her skin. When the outbreak first began, she and her husband, Jakob, had made a pact: they would take matters into their own hands if they became infected. To Jakob’s dismay, Harper wants to live—at least until the fetus she is carrying comes to term. At the hospital, she witnessed infected mothers give birth to healthy babies and believes hers will be fine too. . . if she can live long enough to deliver the child.

Convinced that his do-gooding wife has made him sick, Jakob becomes unhinged, and eventually abandons her as their placid New England community collapses in terror. The chaos gives rise to ruthless Cremation Squads—armed, self-appointed posses roaming the streets and woods to exterminate those who they believe carry the spore. But Harper isn’t as alone as she fears: a mysterious and compelling stranger she briefly met at the hospital, a man in a dirty yellow fire fighter’s jacket, carrying a hooked iron bar, straddles the abyss between insanity and death. Known as The Fireman, he strolls the ruins of New Hampshire, a madman afflicted with Dragonscale who has learned to control the fire within himself, using it as a shield to protect the hunted . . . and as a weapon to avenge the wronged.

In the desperate season to come, as the world burns out of control, Harper must learn the Fireman’s secrets before her life—and that of her unborn child—goes up in smoke.

Of course you don’t need to wait for “Spooky Season” to read any of these. I will say that I don’t recommend reading The Fervor or listening to the audiobook during snowy weather. I listened to the audiobook whilst driving to a medical appointment and freaked out due to the “white specks” I saw floating past my car. It took almost 45 seconds before I realized it was SNOW! Yes, I know I probably shouldn’t get that immersed in a narration, but I was pulled into the story and I momentarily forgot that it wasn’t the 1940s…

I’ve read and re-read all of these books. I’ve recommended all of these books. I can only hope that any, if not all of these, will provide you with hours of similar reading pleasure.

Happy Reading, y’all! ♦

Author: thebookdivasreads

I'm a reader, an avid reader, or perhaps a rabid reader (at least according to my family). I enjoy reading from a variety of different genres but particularly enjoy fiction, mystery, suspense, thrillers, ChickLit, romance and classics. I also enjoy reading about numerous non-fiction subjects including aromatherapy, comparative religions, herbalism, naturopathic medicine, and tea. View all posts by thebookdivasreads