22 Books to Read this Halloween

At 17 Lenora Hope was the only surviving family member of the Hope family massacre and the main suspect. She has never confessed and police were never able to prove it. Now in her 70s Lenora is being cared for by Home-health aide Kit and she finally wants to tell her story. 

Read if you enjoy: thrillers, suspense, plenty of twists, dual timelines

An ordinary house, a man, his daughter and their cat. Their story is not what you think. I can’t tell you any more than that. 

Read if you enjoy: thrillers, unpredictable endings, dark mysteries

When a hurricane hits Florida, the employees of FantasticLand theme park are stranded and left to fend for themselves. Five weeks later, authorities have finally reached them but they never could’ve prepared themselves for what they found. 

Read if you enjoy: survival stories, interview style audiobooks, the dark parts of human nature.

It’s the 1980s in a small suburb of Sweden. Twelve year old Oskar is being bullied every day at school and is wishing someone will make his bullies pay. Maybe the strange new girl who’s just moved in next door can help him. 

Read if you enjoy: vampires, friendship, Swedish literature

Ben is a semi-successful writer who goes back to his hometown of Salem’s Lot to write his next novel. Soon after he arrives strange things begin to happen.

Read if you enjoy: vampires, paranormal, 

The only thing Patricia enjoys in her life is the true crime book club with the other Charleston mums. Book club is the only chance for them to feel like more than wives and mothers. When a handsome stranger moves into the neighbourhood and children start going missing, Patricia believes he could be responsible and starts investigating. 

Read if you enjoy: vampires, dark humour, small town life.

Officer Rick Grimes wakes up from a coma to discover the world is a very different place. Alone and with no idea what happened, he needs to find his family and navigate this new world. 

Read if you enjoy: The Walking Dead TV series, zombies, dystopia, graphic novels

Melanie loves school even though she has to be taken to class while strapped to a wheelchair and at gunpoint. She is a very special girl.

Read if you enjoy: zombies, sci-fi, dystopia 

Maeve loves her job working as everyone’s favourite ice princess at the happiest place on earth. She loves LA, literature, Halloween, pina coladas and her grandmother. Maeve also loves extreme and shocking depravity.

Read if you enjoy: American Psycho, LA, dark humour, Halloween music.

Dexter Morgan is handsome, polite and charming. He is also a serial killer using his work as a blood spatter analyst in the Miami Police department as the perfect cover. Don’t worry, he only kills the ones who really deserve it. 

Read if you enjoy: Dexter the TV series, dark humour, double lives

In a beautiful garden lives a collection of “butterflies”. These butterflies are young women who have been kidnapped and tattooed to resemble their butterfly namesake. Capturing and preserving them is the brutal Gardener. When the garden is discovered, the FBI interview a survivor named Maya. While Maya tells her story, they can’t help but think she is still hiding something. 

Read if you enjoy: thrillers, alternating POVs and timelines

Charity spends her summers playing “the final girl” during a horror experience at Camp Mirror Lake and recreating scenes from the cult classic slasher movie, Curse of Camp Mirror Lake. During the final weekend of the season, Charity’s co-workers begin to disappear and when one is found dead, she realises that being the final girl is no longer a game. 

Read if you enjoy: slasher movies, LGBTQI+ representation

Mary is an average middle aged woman who feels invisible. Having moved back to her hometown to live with her aunt after being fired, Mary begins to notice that she is changing and behaving in ways she can’t explain. 

Read if you enjoy: horror, cults, the supernatural

Following the death of their mother, Rhiannon and her brother Rhett return to their home deep in the Louisiana bayou. Something is there waiting for them and wants to make sure that they never leave again. 

Read if you enjoy: Southern gothic, dark mysticism, voodoo

Jack has spent his whole life running from something that no one else can see. Until the night he and his family are in a near fatal road accident when this something shows its face again. Only this time, his daughter can see it as well. 

Read if you enjoy: Southern gothic, suspense, possession

In an alternative 1922 in the Jim Crow South, the KKK are more powerful than ever. Only now they can be possessed by the demonic, monstrous Ku Kluxes. Maryse, Sadie and Chef are monster hunters intent on destroying these monsters before they destroy the world. 

Read if you enjoy: Historical fiction with supernatural elements

It’s the summer of 1994 and psychologist Daniel, his wife Nora and their daughter Alice move from Ohio to a rustic farmhouse in West Virginia. They fall in love with their new home until they discover a hidden room in the basement with a well that has been boarded up and covered in crucifixes. 

Read if you enjoy: possession, exorcism stories

In London in 1883 the Veil between the living and the dead is thinning. Mediums under the Royal Speaker Society with violet eyes communicate with the spirits. Silas wants the world to see him as the boy he is rather than the girl that he looks like and start training to become a surgeon. He soon finds himself imprisoned in Braxton’s Sanatorium and Finishing School to treat his “veil sickness” and seeing the ghosts of previous “students”.

Read if you enjoy: Gothic, trans and autistic representation

The small Scottish town of Auchenmullan is run down, forgotten and home to only 47 residents. The most exciting thing here is the single grave on the mountain reading “Maggie Wall buried here as a witch”. But Maggie is not really gone. 

Read if you enjoy: Witches, paranormal, dark humour

Englishwoman Abitha arrives in a Puritanical town in Colonial New England to marry a stranger after being sold by her dad. When she becomes a widow under suspicious circumstances, she desperately tries to hold on to what belongs to her. When she befriends Slewfoot and strange things begin happening in town, the townspeople start to whisper about witchcraft. Abitha and Slewfoot will not stand for that. 

Read if you enjoy: Historical fiction, paranormal, feminine rage

When Maeve finds a set of tarot cards at her Catholic school, her readings quickly become the talk of the school. When her best friend Lily draws an unsettling and never before seen card and shortly disappears, Maeve must dig deeper into her connection to the cards and find the clues that no one can find. 

Read if you enjoy: tarot, LGBTQI+ representation, YA, paranormal

Vivienne is a witch and college professor living in the witchy town of Graves Glen, Georgia. Nine years ago Rhys, the descendant of the towns ancestors, breaks her heart and finds himself on the receiving end of a faux curse from Vivi. When Rhys comes back to town to charge the ley lines and things immediately turn into a disaster, Vivi realises her curse might not have been so faux after all. 

Read if you enjoy: Rom-com, witches, Halloween