Nine Halloween Reading Recommendations!
HAPPY HALLOWEEN, READERS! Some of the members of Team PubCrawl wanted to share our recent Halloween-esque favorites! I hope you'll let us know what spooky reads you've discovered recently in the comments section.
Adam Silvera
Rooms by Lauren Oliver breathes new life into ghost stories. There's an ensemble cast, and my favorite narrators were Alice and Sandra, two ghosts inhabiting the walls of this old house. There are family secrets, the sudden appearance of a new ghost, stunning prose, surprising humanity from the ghosts, and a glowing ending. It's not a tale of vengeance or a typical journey toward redemption, but it's definitely a unique kind of ghost story you should check out.
Erin Bowman
Between the Spark and the Burn by April Tucholke, which just came out in August! It's the sequel to Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea and both are incredibly creepy, haunting and atmospheric. Perfect Halloween reads for anyone craving a little gothic horror.
Susan Dennard
So...I might have devoured the entire Fever series by Karen Marie Moning recently. What with the brooding dudes, terrifying monsters like you can't (and don't want to) imagine, and the whole plot revolving around Samhain (a.k.a. Halloween), I cannot imagine a more atmospheric (and smexy!) read for Halloween.
Julie Eshbaugh
I recommend Susan Dennard's Something Strange and Deadly trilogy for Halloween season! The series is set in a fantastic, alternate-history world with a thrilling gothic feel. I loved traveling from nineteenth-century Philadelphia to Paris to Egypt with the amazing Eleanor as she battled an evil necromancer (all with romance thrown in, of course!).
Jordan Hamessley London
I recommend the "Women Destroy Horror" issue of Nightmare Magazine edited by Ellen Datlow featuring great horror short fiction and non-fiction discussing women in the genre. It's totally badass.
S. Jae-Jones (JJ)
I recommend Unmade by Sarah Rees Brennan, the final book in the Lynburn Legacy trilogy. A spin on gothic tropes, it has a mixed-race Japanese heroine in a picturesque English town. The town, of course, has dark, dark secrets. Oh, and invest in some Kleenex stock because SARAH REES BRENNAN WILL RIP OUT YOUR HEART AND EAT IT. She thrives on the tears of her readers, like a YA Erzebet Bathory.
Kat Zhang
I just finished The Madman's Daughter, and it's definitely Halloween creepy!
Janice Hardy
Servants of the Storm by Delilah S. Dawson! Very creepy, wonderful demon-gothic setting in a post-Katrina-esque hurricane devastated Savannah. Demons cause natural disasters and steal people's souls :) Fun! Good scary book for Halloween.
Joanna Volpe
The Dead Boys by Royce Buckingham. This middle grade book was a little slow to start, but it definitely got super creepy and it's stuck with me. It's about a giant sycamore tree that is sapping the life of boys it's lured into its roots over the past 80 years. It keeps them just alive enough to continue feeding on them. TOTALLY CREEPY.
Hope you all have a fun and safe Halloween! Let us know what spooky books you're reading!