14 Down-Right Scary Novels to Read This Halloween

Cooger & Dark’s Pandemonium Shadow Show arrives in Greentown, Illinois, under cover of night the week before Halloween. The town is delighted, but something seductive and sinister lurks in the smoke and mirrors. Two young boys will discover that all is not as it seems and that wishes have a heavy cost as they descend into the horror that await them at this carnival.

This bone-chilling ghost story centers on Arthur Kipps, a young lawyer who leaves London for the isolated, foggy English moor to settle the affairs of the recently deceased Mrs. Alice Drablow of Eel Marsh House. Soon the routine paperwork he expected is derailed by a series of terrifying, unexplained occurrences: a chair rocking in an abandoned nursery, a child’s scream through the fog, and the dreaded woman in black herself.

Vic McQueen has a special gift for finding things—whenever she rides her bike over the rickety covered bridge in the woods, she emerges in the exact place she needs to be. So when she goes out looking for trouble, she finds it in Charles Talent Manx, a not-quite-human terror who kidnaps children in his 1938 Rolls-Royce Wraith. Vic escapes his clutches, but years later, when Manx returns and takes something irreplaceable from her, she will have to face him down once and for all.

Derry, Maine, is a cursed place—a town that has been terrorized by an ancient evil for generations. Seven teenagers encounter this entity—sometimes in the form of a clown known as Pennywise, sometimes in the form of their deepest and most personal fears—and seemingly defeat it. But 28 years later, when the evil resurfaces, the seven will have to make good on their childhood pact and return to Derry to defeat It again.

The basis for the horror movie franchise, this Japanese chiller tells of a mysterious videotape that warns the viewer he or she will die in one week unless a certain, unspecified act is performed. When four teenagers die one week after watching the tape, journalist Asakawa undertakes an investigation that leads him from the bustling city of Tokyo to rural Japan, where a mountain resort and a countryside clinic are haunted by the past.

No list of horror novels would be complete without the great-grandmother of them all, Mary Shelley’s masterpiece. The story of a young scientist whose experimentation with creating life from death gives birth to a hideous creature who must walk the earth looking for his place in a world that reviles him as a monster and who is driven to seek vengeance on his creator.

In one of the most iconic haunted-house novels, four people arrive at the notorious Hill House: Dr. Montague, an occult scholar looking for evidence that the house is haunted; his assistant Theodora; a friendless, fragile young woman named Eleanor; and Luke, the heir to Hill House. As they spend more and more time in the house, it gathers its sinister powers to plunge them into the depths of terror.

This masterful tale centers on an apparently young amnesiac with disturbing, inhuman needs and extraordinary abilities. She makes a shocking discovery: she is actually a genetically modified 53-year-old vampire. Desperately trying to uncover what she can about her origins and former life, she is pursued by parties who are hell-bent on destroying her.

This chilling novel blends historical fiction, pulp noir, and plenty of Lovecraftian horror while examining the specter of racism in America. When his father goes missing, 22-year-old veteran Atticus Turner, along with his uncle and childhood friend, embarks on a road trip across Jim Crow America to find him. Along the way, he encounters horrors both mundane and fantastical.

This unforgettable mystery examines race, nationality, and family legacies. The Silver family house in the closed-off town of Dover, England, has been home to four generations of Silver women, who all share a mysterious, strong connection. When Lily Silver dies suddenly, her daughter, Miranda, begins suffering from strange ailments. Then Miranda brings a friend to stay with her, setting off a chain of chilling events.

In this horrifying mash-up of LORD OF THE FLIES and 28 DAYS LATER, Scoutmaster Riggs leads a troop of boys into the Canadian wilderness on their annual weekend hunting trip. But when an emaciated stranger consumed by an unnatural, voracious hunger, Riggs and the boys are exposed to a bioengineered terror that will have them fighting for survival against disease, the elements—and one another.

In this hauntingly beautiful collection of graphic horror stories based on the webcomic sensation, Emily Carroll offers up a stunning variety of thrills and chills. These are fairy tales gone terribly wrong, where houses hold terrible secrets, no one is who or what they seem to be, and the woods are full of unknown terrors.

The small town of Deer Valley, Oregon, searches for a boy—Jude Brighton, who has been missing for three days. His best friend and cousin, Stevie, knows from watching cop shows that the first 48 hours are critical, so he embarks on his own investigation, delving into the history of his small town, which has been haunted by disappearances and strange, unsolved crimes.

Finley Morgan is haunted by voices no one else can hear and prophetic dreams she can’t understand, so she seeks help from her grandmother Eloise, a psychic who lives in The Hollows, New York. Merri Gleason, at the end of her rope after ten months of searching for her missing daughter, turns to private detective Jones Cooper, who sometimes works Eloise. As winter descends on The Hollows, Finley and Eloise are drawn into the mystery and into the dark past of the town itself.