Welcome friend! Even if I am not in the mood for horror stories and haunted tales every October, I still enjoy sharing spooky season books filled with haunted houses, lingering spirits, and that deliciously eerie atmosphere that makes you want to leave the lights on.
This year, I’ve gathered eight ghostly reads that span the spectrum: some are spine-chilling, others are tender or gothic, and a few play with the spirit world in surprising ways. Together, they make a stack that offers something for every kind of spooky-season reader.
Let’s dive in:
8 Spooky Season Reads
📖 Bat Eater and Other Names for Cora Zeng by Kylie Lee Baker
Why read it?
This is an intense and emotional book that explores grief, cultural identity, and supernatural horror in the wake of pandemic-fueled racism. I wasn’t prepared for what it had to offer. The ghosts are truly terrifying in this one.
Synopsis:
Cora Zeng is a crime scene cleaner, washing away the remains of brutal murders and suicides in Chinatown. The bloody messes don’t bother her, not when she’s already witnessed the most horrific thing possible: her sister being pushed in front of a train.
Before fleeing the scene, the murderer whispered two words: bat eater.
Months pass, the killer is never caught, and Cora can barely keep herself together. She pushes away all feelings, disregards the bite marks that appear on her coffee table, and won’t take her aunt’s advice to prepare for the Hungry Ghost Festival, when the gates of hell open.
Cora tries to ignore the rising dread in her stomach, even when she and her weird co-workers begin finding bat carcasses at their crime scene clean-ups. But Cora can’t ignore the fact that all their recent clean-ups have been the bodies of East Asian women.
Soon Cora will learn: you can’t just ignore hungry ghosts.
✨ Check out my discussion with Ariel here.
(Originally, I had included The Last Spirits of Manhattan (Goodreads), but after finishing it, I realized it wasn’t quite spooky enough for this list. In its place, I have added Bat Eater — a terrifying read I finished earlier this year that I haven’t stopped thinking about.)
📖 The Star and the Strange Moon by Constance Sayers
Why read it?
If you would like a taste of haunted cinema, secret societies and a deal with the devil, this one should be on your radar. It’s a gothic ghost story that’s just right for the spooky season as well as to curl up with in the winter.
Synopsis:
1968: Actress Gemma Turner once dreamed of stardom. Unfortunately, she’s on the cusp of slipping into obscurity. When she’s offered the lead in a radical new horror film, Gemma believes her luck has finally changed. But L’Etrange Lune’s set is not what she expected. The director is eccentric, and the script doesn’t make sense.
Gemma is determined to make this work. It’s her last chance to achieve her dream—but that dream is about to derail her life. One night, between the shadows of an alleyway, Gemma disappears on set and is never seen again. Yet, Gemma is still alive. She’s been transported into the film and the script—and the monsters within it—are coming to life. She must play her role perfectly if she hopes to survive.
2015: Gemma Turner’s disappearance is one of film history’s greatest mysteries—one that’s haunted film student Christopher Kent ever since he saw his first screening of L’Etrange Lune. The screenings only happen once a decade and each time there is new, impossible footage of Gemma long after she vanished. Desperate to discover the truth, Christopher risks losing himself. He’ll have to outrun the cursed legacy of the film—or become trapped by it forever.
✨Read my review and interview with the author.
📖 Death’s Pale Flag by Gary R. Simonds
Why read it?
I have yet to read this tale about a ghost in a hospital and I am surprised I don’t know of more stories of haunted hospitals! If this intrigues you too, check out this indie book. Gary R. Simonds brings his experiences of the operation room to the literature world.
Synopsis:
In this Literary Titan Book Award Winner, A highly-successful brain surgeon begins to encounter ghosts.
Brain surgeon and unlikely war hero, Ryan Brenan, has it all. A booming practice, a beautiful home in an idyllic setting, and a happy loving family. Then, the apparitions begin. Subtle at first, but soon there’s no doubt about it, he’s seeing ghosts, spirits, the undead. Of course, he could just be going nuts, cracking under the pressure of his constant exposure to death, mayhem, and tragedy. But, he believes he has proof that the ghosts are very real, and that they are specifically haunting him.
✨What is life like as a brain surgeon? Learn from Gary in this post.
📖 The Artist of Blackberry Grange by Paulette Kennedy
Why read it?
A family opportunity takes a sinister twist in this story about a woman dealing with grief. It’s a gothic tale that’s just right for enjoying at home.
Synopsis:
For a young caregiver in the Ozarks, an old house holds haunting memories in a ghostly novel about family secrets, sacrifice, and lost loves by the author of The Devil and Mrs. Davenport.
In the summer of 1925, the winds of change are particularly chilling for a young woman whose life has suddenly become unbalanced.
Devastated by her mother’s death and a cruel, broken engagement, Sadie Halloran learns that her great-aunt Marguerite, a renowned artist now in the throes of dementia, needs a live-in companion. Grasping at newfound purpose, Sadie leaves her desolate Kansas City boardinghouse for Blackberry Grange, Marguerite’s once-grand mansion sitting precariously atop an Arkansas bluff. Though Marguerite is a fading shell of the vibrant woman Sadie remembers, Marguerite is feverishly compelled to paint eerie, hallucinatory portraits of old lovers—some cherished, some regretted, and some beastly. All of them haunting.
With each passing night, time itself seems to shift with the shadows at Blackberry Grange. As truth and delusion begin to blur, Sadie must uncover the secrets that hold Marguerite captive to her past before reality—and Marguerite’s life—slips away entirely.
📖 The September House by Carissa Orlando
Why read it?
If you weren’t afraid of basements before, after this book, you might be. This is a captivating debut with dark humor and such an addicting narration that I didn’t want to stop once I started.
Synopsis:
A woman is determined to stay in her dream home even after it becomes a haunted nightmare in this compulsively readable, twisty, and layered debut novel.
When Margaret and her husband Hal bought the large Victorian house on Hawthorn Street—for sale at a surprisingly reasonable price—they couldn’t believe they finally had a home of their own. Then they discovered the hauntings. Every September, the walls drip blood. The ghosts of former inhabitants appear, and all of them are terrified of something that lurks in the basement. Most people would flee.
Margaret is not most people.
Margaret is staying. It’s her house. But after four years Hal can’t take it anymore, and he leaves abruptly. Now, he’s not returning calls, and their daughter Katherine—who knows nothing about the hauntings—arrives, intent on looking for her missing father. To make things worse, September has just begun, and with every attempt Margaret and Katherine make at finding Hal, the hauntings grow more harrowing, because there are some secrets the house needs to keep.
✨ Read my review.
📖 The Hong Kong Widow by Kristen Loesch
Why read it?
Spirit mediums and a remote mansion that was the site for a massacre… there are bound to be some angry ghosts lurking here. I am scared to pick up this book but I promise I will this month! Would you join me?
Synopsis:
Hong Kong, 1953: In a remote mansion, witnesses insist a massacre took place. The police see nothing but pristine rooms and declare it a collective hallucination. Until decades later, when one witness returns…from the Edgar®-nominated author of The Last Russian Doll.
In 1950s Hong Kong, Mei is a young refugee of the Chinese Communist revolution struggling to put her past in Shanghai behind her. When she receives a shocking invitation—to take part in a competition pitting six spirit mediums against one another in a series of six séances over six nights, until a single winner emerges, in one of Hong Kong’s most notorious haunted houses—she has every reason to refuse.
Except that the hostess, a former Shanghainese silent film star, is none other than the wife of the man who once destroyed Mei’s entire life.
It is promised the winner will receive a fortune, but there is only one prize Mei wants: revenge.
Decades later, the final night of that competition has become an infamous urban legend: The police were called to the scene of a brutal massacre but found no evidence, dismissing it as a collective hallucination. Mei knows what she saw, but now someone else is convinced they know what she did. She must uncover the truth about that fateful night in the cursed house at last—even if the ghosts of her past are waiting for her there. . . .
✨Stay tuned for my review later this month!
📖 The Salvage by Anbara Salam
Why read it?
This recommendation comes from Ariel! If hospitals can be haunted, surely the ocean can be too—and this story dives right into that eerie possibility.
Synopsis (from the publisher):
It is 1962, and Marta Khoury, a trailblazing marine archaeologist, has been called to Cairnroch, a small island off the east coast of Scotland. A Victorian shipwreck, dragged from arctic waters, holds the remains of a celebrated explorer and the treasures of his final expedition. But on her first dive down to the ship, Marta becomes convinced she has seen a dark figure lurking amid the wreckage.
When the Cuban Missile Crisis and the deep chill of a record-breaking winter keeps Marta stranded on Cairnroch, she forms a relationship with Elsie, a local woman working in the island’s only hotel. When the ship’s artefacts inexplicably disappear, Marta and Elsie have to brave the freezing conditions to search for the missing objects before anyone else catches on. As something eerie seems to follow her at every step, Marta must confront if the haunting is a figment of her imagination, the repercussions from a terrible mistake from her past, or if something more sinister is at play that will trap her and everyone on the island—and their secrets—in an icy wilderness.
📖 HEX by Thomas Olde Heuvelt
Why read it?
No ghostly book list feels complete without my all-time favorite novel. But of course this comes with a big disclaimer: If you want a hard read, a book you cannot put down, where terror is interwoven so well into the narrative that at one point, you will lose track of what is real… read this book. It will wreck you.
Synopsis:
Whoever is born here, is doomed to stay ’til death. Whoever settles, never leaves.
Welcome to Black Spring, the seemingly picturesque Hudson Valley town haunted by the Black Rock Witch, a seventeenth century woman whose eyes and mouth are sewn shut. Muzzled, she walks the streets and enters homes at will. She stands next to children’s bed for nights on end. Everybody knows that her eyes may never be opened or the consequences will be too terrible to bear.
The elders of Black Spring have virtually quarantined the town by using high-tech surveillance to prevent their curse from spreading. Frustrated with being kept in lockdown, the town’s teenagers decide to break their strict regulations and go viral with the haunting. But, in so doing, they send the town spiraling into dark, medieval practices of the distant past.
This chilling novel heralds the arrival of an exciting new voice in mainstream horror and dark fantasy.
✨Read my review. It has some art!
Final Thoughts
I’ll be reviewing some of these in the weeks ahead, so keep an eye out if you’d like a deeper dive into one of them.
Whether you like your ghosts terrifying, tender, or somewhere in between, these eight books capture the many shades and hauntings of the spooky season. Some are already out while a few will hit the stores this month. Which one will you pick up first?
spooky season books
Be First to Comment