Do not be afraid! Hallowe’en is just around the corner so we have rounded up some scary novels for you to fully immerse yourself in this spooky time of year. We hope they don’t keep you awake all night (unless it’s because you just can’t put them down).
Night Side of the River by Jeanette Winterson
Our lives are digital, exposed and always-on. We track our friends and family wherever they go. We have millennia of knowledge at our fingertips.
We know everything about our world. But we know nothing about theirs.
We have changed, but our ghosts have not. They’ve simply adapted and innovated, found new channels to reach us. They inhabit our apps and wander the metaverse just as they haunt our homes and our memories, always seeking new ways to connect.
To live amongst us.
To remind us.
To tempt us.
To take their revenge.
These stories are not ours to tell. They are the stories of the dead – of those we’ve lost, loved, forgotten… and feared. Some are fiction. But some may not be.
Eyes Guts Throats Bones by Moira Fowley
What will the end of the world look like?
Will it be an old man slowly turned to gold, flowers raining from the sky, or a hole cut through the wire fencing that keeps the monsters out?
Is it someone you love wearing your face, or a good old fashioned inter-dimensional summoning?
Does it sound like a howl outside the window, or does it look like coming home?
This startling and irresistibly witty collection from the phenomenally talented Moira Fowley is an exploration of all our darkest impulses and deepest fears.
For as long as she can remember, Belle has been insidiously obsessed with her skin and skincare videos. When her estranged mother Noelle mysteriously dies, Belle finds herself back in Southern California, dealing with her mother’s considerable debts and grappling with lingering questions about her death. The stakes escalate when a strange woman in red appears at the funeral, offering a tantalizing clue about her mother’s demise, followed by a cryptic video about a transformative spa experience. With the help of a pair of red shoes, Belle is lured into the barbed embrace of La Maison de Méduse, the same lavish, culty spa to which her mother was devoted. There, Belle discovers the frightening secret behind her (and her mother’s) obsession with the mirror—and the great shimmering depths (and demons) that lurk on the other side of the glass.
Snow White meets Eyes Wide Shut in this surreal descent into the dark side of beauty, envy, grief, and the complicated love between mothers and daughters. With black humor and seductive horror, ROUGE explores the cult-like nature of the beauty industry—as well as the danger of internalizing its pitiless gaze. Brimming with California sunshine and blood-red rose petals, ROUGE holds up a warped mirror to our relationship with mortality, our collective fixation with the surface, and the wondrous, deep longing that might lie beneath.
Holly Gibney, one of Stephen King’s most compelling and ingeniously resourceful characters, returns in this thrilling novel to solve the gruesome truth behind multiple disappearances in a Midwestern town.
Stephen King’s HOLLY marks the triumphant return of beloved King character Holly Gibney. Readers have witnessed Holly’s gradual transformation from a shy (but also brave and ethical) recluse in Mr Mercedes to Bill Hodges’s partner in Finders Keepers to a full-fledged, smart, and occasionally tough private detective in The Outsider. In King’s new novel, Holly is on her own, and up against a pair of unimaginably depraved and brilliantly disguised adversaries.
When Penny Dahl calls the Finders Keepers detective agency hoping for help locating her missing daughter, Holly is reluctant to accept the case. Her partner, Pete, has Covid. Her (very complicated) mother has just died. And Holly is meant to be on leave. But something in Penny Dahl’s desperate voice makes it impossible for Holly to turn her down.
Mere blocks from where Bonnie Dahl disappeared live Professors Rodney and Emily Harris. They are the picture of bourgeois respectability: married octogenarians, devoted to each other, and semi-retired lifelong academics. But they are harbouring an unholy secret in the basement of their well-kept, book-lined home, one that may be related to Bonnie’s disappearance. And it will prove nearly impossible to discover what they are up to: they are savvy, they are patient, and they are ruthless.
Holly must summon all her formidable talents to outthink and outmanoeuvre the shockingly twisted professors in this chilling new masterwork from Stephen King.
Hare House by Sally Hinchcliffe
Hare House is not its real name, of course. I have, if you will forgive me, kept names to a minimum here, for reasons that will become understandable . . .
In the first brisk days of autumn, a woman arrives in Scotland having left her job at an all-girls school in London in mysterious circumstances.
Moving into a cottage on the remote estate of Hare House, she begins to explore her new home. But among the tiny roads, wild moorland, and scattered houses, something more sinister lurks: local tales of witchcraft, clay figures and young men sent mad.
Striking up a friendship with her landlord and his younger sister, she begins to suspect that all might not be quite as it seems at Hare House. And as autumn turns to winter, and a heavy snowfall traps the inhabitants of the estate within its walls, tensions rise to fever pitch.
The Winter Sprits by various authors
The tradition of a haunted tale at Christmas has flourished across the centuries. These twelve stories – authored by some of today’s most loved and lauded writers of historical and gothic fiction – are all centred around Christmas or Advent, boldly and playfully re-imagining a beloved tradition for a modern audience.
Taking you from a haunted Tuscan villa to a remote Scottish island with a dark secret,, these vibrant haunted stories are your ultimate companion for frosty nights.
So curl up, light a candle, and fall under the spell of winters past . . .
Includes stories by 12 authors including Natasha Pulley, Laura Purcell, Jess Kidd and Stuart Turton.