Sure, seeing the pavements run five deep with women dressed as slutty nurses may be horrifying, but the truly chilling way to spend Halloween is reading. Here are the best ghoulish books to read this autumn.
The Taxidermist’s Daughter - Kate Mosse
It’s 1912 and Connie Gifford still suffers from memory loss inflicted by a fall ten years ago. She lives on a remote part of the Sussex marshes with her father (the taxidermist) whose business is in ruins, along with his own sanity. For him, it’s the booze, and he’s prone to muttering mysterious half remembered thoughts. Then, the swollen corpse of a young woman - recently garrotted with taxidermy wire - appears in the boggy stream to the side of the house. The house’s sense of utter isolation, the grimly fascinating taxidermy details and the horror that Connie uncovers all combine to make a between-the-fingers read you won’t forget.
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The Turn of the Screw - Henry James
As magnificent as it is terrifying, The Turn of the Screw set the template for a lot of modern ghost stories. It begins with a classic device: the discovery of the journal of someone now dead, and ends with the reader in shreds. A Victorian governess (now dead) looks after two orphaned children in their remote country estate. They seem sweet, apart from their increasing bad behaviour, and the two ghosts they seem to be talking to - who seem to be ex employees of the estate. Who are they and what did they do? It’s nice to think you’re a rational person, but it does get tough after reading this one - or indeed watching its fantastic movie adaptation, The Innocents.
Stephen King - Revival
An overenthusiastic preacher is unnerving at the best of times, but one who is obsessed by electricity ..and then tragically loses his wife and child, makes for quite a character. Stephen King is on top form with this utterly horrifying story. Shorter and punchier than his recent work, it starts in a New England town in the 1960s and spans time to see the young boy once transfixed by Reverend Jacobs now a heroin addict. Years later, when meets Jacobs again they become closer than ever before, with inevitably frightening consequences. And by frightening we mean reading-with-the-light-on-at-4am-and-whimpering. This is vintage King.
Consumed - David Cronenberg
If you’re not usually keen to read creepy novels as they’re so often set in the misty candlelit past, then right here is where you need to start freaking yourself out. Cronenberg - director of The Fly, Crash and The Naked Lunch , has produced a debut novel tackling online journalism, organ trafficking, dead French philosophers and a lot of sex. And maybe a bit of cannibalism. He’s far from having Stephen King’s straightforward grip on narrative, but this is brilliantly odd and atmospheric, and will leave your skin crawling. Read on an empty stomach.
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Printer’s Devil Court - Susan Hill
If you haven’t read Hill’s classic, The Woman in Black, start there: it’s an exemplary ghost story, a deserving classic and takes as long to read as it does to watch a film. This is her latest, and it’s only marginally less chilling, with Victorian London at its foggy, murky best. A group of medical student stay up late, throwing ideas around in the candlelight. One thing leads to another and soon they’re in an underground mortuary effectively bringing back the dead, but a bit … wrong. Years later they’ve tried to forget about what happened - but, well, it’s a ghost story. So we’ll leave the rest to the incomparably scary author. You’re in good hands.
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This article originally appeared on The Debrief.