HAPPY HALLOWEEN!

Beware—ghosts, vampires, and all creatures of the night have awakened and are ready to creep beyond the pages. To help you get into the spooky spirit, we are recommending some of our most bone-chilling and remarkable reads. Witches, hauntings, devils – oh my! We have a book for everyone this Halloween – enter these eerie stories if you dare.

 

BOOKS ABOUT DEVILS

Two-Step Devil by Jamie Quatro

In Two-Step Devil, Quatro delivers a striking and formally inventive story of the unlikely relationship between two strangers on the margins of society and the shadowy forces that threaten their futures. In 2014, in Lookout Mountain, Alabama, the Prophet—a seventy-year-old man who paints his visions—lives off the grid in a cabin near the Georgia border. While scrounging for materials at the local scrapyard, the Prophet sees a car pull up to an abandoned gas station. In the back seat is a teenage girl with zip ties on her wrists, a girl he realizes he must rescue from her current life.

“Theologically avant-garde and emotionally supple, Two-Step Devil is a Southern Gothic novel for fans of Denis Johnson, Frank Stanford and Wendell Berry, infused with the genre’s requisite imagery of ‘thick blankets of kudzu’ vines and smells of ‘blood, grease and sweat.’ And, like her forebears, Quatro wrestles with what it might look like to find and embrace a living faith in the modern world.”—Melissa Broder, New York Times

 

The Devil’s Best Trick: How the Face of Evil Disappeared by Randall Sullivan

Throughout history, humans have struggled to explain the evils of the world and the darkest parts of ourselves. The Devil’s Best Trick is a unique and far-reaching investigation into evil and the myriad ways we attempt to understand it – particularly through the figure of the Devil. Sullivan’s narrative moves through centuries of historical, religious, and cultural conceptions of evil and the Devil: from the Mesopotamian and Egyptian gods to the Book of Job to the New Testament to the witch hunts in Europe in the 15th through 17th centuries to the history of the devil-worshipping “Black Mass” ceremony and its depictions in 19th-century French literature. He references major literary, religious and historical figures, from the Persian sages Zoroaster and Mani, Plato, Thomas Aquinas, John Milton, Edgar Allan Poe, Aleister Crowley, and many more, among them Charles Baudelaire, from whose work Sullivan took the title of the book.

“Each chapter is a turn, a surprise. The writing is never clichéd, nor is the thinking. Sullivan knows a great lede, and he’s just as good with cliffhangers.”–Clancy Martin, New York Times Book Review

 

The Angel of History by Rabih Alameddine

Set over the course of one night in the waiting room of a psych clinic, The Angel of History follows Yemeni-born poet Jacob as he revisits the events of his life, from his maternal upbringing in an Egyptian whorehouse to his adolescence under the aegis of his wealthy father and his life as a gay Arab man in San Francisco at the height of AIDS. Hovered over by the presence of alluring, sassy Satan, who taunts Jacob to remember his painful past, and dour, frigid Death, who urges him to forget and give up on life, Jacob is also attended to by fourteen saints. With Jacob recalling his life in Cairo, Beirut, Sana’a, Stockholm, and San Francisco, Alameddine gives us a charged philosophical portrayal of a brilliant mind in crisis. This is a profound and winning story of the war between memory and oblivion with which we wrestle every day of our life.

“Alameddine, entrancing and unflinching, is in easy command of his bricolage narrative, and he leavens its tragedy with wit.” —New York Times Book Review

 

BOOKS ABOUT WITCHES

Queen Macbeth by Val McDermid

A radical, rip-roaring counternarrative, Queen Macbeth delivers an illuminating portrait of Shakespeare’s most famous villain, and the treacherous pursuit of ambition that made her legendary. A thousand years ago in an ancient Scottish landscape, a woman is on the run with her three companions – a healer, a weaver, and a seer. The men hunting her will kill her – because she is the only one who stands between them and their violent ambition. She is no lady: she is the first queen of Scotland, married to a king called Macbeth. As the net closes in, what unfurls is a tale of passion, forced marriage, bloody massacre, and the harsh realities of medieval Scotland. At the heart of it is one strong, charismatic woman, who survived loss and jeopardy to outwit the endless plotting of a string of ruthless and power-hungry men. Her struggle won her a country. But now it could cost her life.

“The Scottish Play is reimagined by Scotland’s Queen of Crime in this captivating new novel, which follows Lady Macbeth from her days on the run from a bloody medieval patriarchy, through to her ascendancy, a reign that turns out to be even more sinister, with murderous challengers at every turn.”—Dwyer Murphy, CrimeReads

 

Witches on the Road Tonight by Sheri Holman

Witches on the Road Tonight, best-selling author Sheri Holman’s most critically acclaimed novel to date, exposes the fears and lies that haunt several generations of an Appalachian family, taking readers deep into the backwoods of the Depression-era south and teasing out the dark compulsions and desperate longings that blur the line between love and betrayal. As a child growing up in 1940’s rural Virginia, Eddie Alley’s quiet life is rooted in the rumors of his mother’s witchcraft. But when he’s visited by a writer and glamorous photographer researching American folklore for the WPA, the spell of his mother’s unorthodox life is violently disrupted, and Eddie is inspired to pursue a future beyond the confines of his dead-end town.

“Undeniably impressive . . . [Holman] boasts a fine Gothic imagination, summoning visceral details at will . . . [and] evoking the blur between the real and the supernatural as if it were the most straightforward thing, a knack possessed by few writers, though Alice Hoffman immediately springs to mind . . .” —Julie Myerson, The New York Times Book Review

 

The Blue Maiden by Anna Noyes

It’s 1825, four generations after Berggrund Island’s women stood accused of witchcraft under the eye of their priest, now long dead. In his place is Pastor Silas, a widower with two wild young daughters, Beata and Ulrika. The sisters are outcasts: imaginative, oppositional, increasingly obsessed with the lore and legend of the island’s dark past and their absent mother, whom their father refuses to speak of. As the girls come of age, and the strictures of the community shift but never wane, their rebellions twist and sharpen. Ever capable Ulrika shoulders the burden of keeping house, while Bea, alone with unsettling visions and impulses, hungers for companionship and attention. When an enigmatic outsider arrives at their door, his presence threatens their family bond and unearths – piece by piece – a buried history to shocking ends.

“Anna Noyes’s haunting first novel, The Blue Maiden, explores the sinister effects of this legacy on the two daughters of Silas, the island’s current pastor, a descendant of one of the few women to be spared.”—Alida Becker, New York Times

 

The Daylight Gate by Jeanette Winterson

An instant bestseller in the UK, The Daylight Gate is Jeanette Winterson’s singular vision of a dark period of complicated morality, sex, and tragic plays for power in a time when politics and religion were closely intertwined. On Good Friday, 1612, deep in the woods of Pendle Hill, a gathering of thirteen is interrupted by the local magistrate. Two of their coven have already been imprisoned for witchcraft and are awaiting trial, but those who remain are vouched for by the wealthy and respected Alice Nutter. Shrouded in mystery and gifted with eternally youthful beauty, Alice is established in Lancashire society and insulated by her fortune. As those accused of witchcraft retreat into darkness, Alice stands alone as a realm-crosser, a conjurer of powers that will either destroy her or set her free.

“From one gruesome development to the next, Winterson’s haunting imagery and narrative immediacy captivate…an engrossing story that’s sure to leave you shivering.” —Catherine Straut, Elle

 

BOOKS ABOUT GHOSTS/HAUNTINGS

Night Side of the River by Jeanette Winterson

In this delightfully chilling collection, the iconic Jeanette Winterson turns her fearless gaze to the realm of ghosts, interspersing her own encounters with the supernatural alongside hair-raising fictions. Lifting the veil between the living and the dead, Winterson spirits us away to a haunted estate that ensnares a nomadic young couple in its own dark past, a staged immersive ghost tour gone awry, a West Village séance that threatens the bounds between AI and reality, and a vacation home in the metaverse where a widow visits an improved version of her deceased husband. Gloriously gothic and unnervingly contemporary, Winterson examines grief, revenge, and the myriad ways in which technology can disrupt the boundary between life and death.

“For Jeanette Winterson, ghost stories are not old-fashioned or anachronistic in the modern world, but both cutting-edge and primal.”—May-lee Chai, New York Times

 

Muckross Abbey and Other Stories by Sabina Murray

Sabina Murray has long been celebrated for her mastery of the gothic. Now in Muckross Abbey and Other Stories, she returns to the genre, bringing readers to haunted sites from a West Australian convent school to the moors of England to the shores of Cape Cod in ten strange tales that are layered, meta, and unforgettable. From a twisted recasting of Daphne Du Maurier’s Rebecca, to an actor who dies for his art only to haunt his mother’s house, to the titular “Muckross Abbey,” an Irish chieftain burial site cursed by the specter of a flesh-eating groom—in this collection Murray gives us painters, writers, historians, and nuns all confronting the otherworldly in fantastically creepy ways. With notes of Wharton and James, Stoker and Shelley, now drawn into the present, these macabre stories are sure to captivate and chill.

“Carefully crafted slices of modern gothic layered with intrigue, suspense and macabre delights.”—Minneapolis Star Tribune

 

The Greatcoat by Helen Dunmore

Best-selling novelist and poet Helen Dunmore’s historical novels have earned her comparisons in the press to Tolstoy and Emily Brontë. In her newest book, Dunmore mines the past to chilling effect in an evocative and sophisticated ghost story about a love affair between a neglected wife and a mysterious soldier. It is the winter of 1952 when Isabel Carey moves to the East Riding of Yorkshire with her new husband, Philip, a medical doctor. While Philip spends long hours working away from home, Isabel finds herself lonely and vulnera­ble as she adjusts to the realities of being a housewife in the country. A spectral tale of love and war that blurs the line between the real and imaginary, The Greatcoat is an “atmospheric and accomplished” (Woman & Home) literary chiller about quiet temptations and the lasting trauma of battle.

“Written in crisp, enthralling prose . . . The dynamics of Isabel’s new marriage are conveyed with subtlety and precision, and the sense of deja vu surrounding the story makes it all the more chilling . . . Tense and engaging.” —The New Yorker

 

The Ghosts of Galway by Ken Bruen

In The Ghosts of Galway, Ken Bruen brings those elegiac talents to bear on a case involving a famously blasphemous red book and his equally profane antihero Jack Taylor. As well-versed in politics, pop culture, and crime fiction as he is ill-fated in life, Jack Taylor is recovering from a mistaken medical diagnosis and a failed suicide attempt. In need of money, and with former cop on his resume, Jack has been hired as a night-shift security guard. But his Ukrainian boss has Jack in mind for some off-the-books work. He wants Jack to find what some claim to be the first true book of heresy, The Red Book, currently in the possession of a rogue priest who is hiding out in Galway after fleeing a position at the Vatican. Despite Jack’s distaste for priests of any stripe, the money is too good to turn down. Em, the many-faced woman who has had a vise on Jack’s heart and mind for the past two years, reappears and turns out to be entangled with the story of The Red Book, too, leading Jack down evermore mysterious and lethal pathways.

“Events unfold in the most mannered prose since the glory days of James Ellroy against the distant echoes of Donald Trump’s shockingly successful presidential campaign . . . Dispensing with the genre’s customary pleasures . . . Bruen still manages to deliver prose that’s both tough and elegiac.” —Kirkus Reviews

 

GENERAL SPOOKY/HALLOWEEN VIBES

Ritual by Mo Hayder

A grisly tale of murder, witchcraft, and the dark side of healing, from the “diabolically gifted” (Entertainment Weekly) author of The Devil of Nanking. In Ritual, Hayder gives us a taut, chilling tale in which clandestine occult practices, New Age medicine, and the drug underground collide in a modern city challenged by colliding immigrant cultures. Just after lunch on a Tuesday in April, nine feet under water, police diver Flea Marley closes her gloved fingers around a human hand. The fact that there’s no body attached is disturbing enough. Even more disturbing is the discovery, a day later, of the matching hand. In razor-sharp prose, Mo Hayder has woven a taut, unforgettable tale of supernatural bloodshed in a hypermodern urban landscape. The best book to date by one of the most frighteningly talented writers in her field, Ritual is a masterpiece of suspense, one that will keep readers guessing until the very last breath.

“Ritual is a thrilling ride through dark and dangerous places.” —Richard Dansky, author of Firefly Rain

The Cellar by Minette Walters

The Cellar is a harrowing, compulsively readable novel about a family of African immigrants, the Songolis, and the dark secret they keep hidden in the depths of their seemingly respectable house in the London suburbs. On the day Mr. and Mrs. Songoli’s young son fails to come home from school, fourteen-year-old Muna’s fortunes change for the better. Until then, her bedroom was a dank windowless cellar, her activities confined to cooking and cleaning. Over the years, she had grown used to being abused by the Songoli family—to being their slave. Now that Scotland Yard has swarmed the Songoli house to investigate the disappearance of the son, Muna is given a real bedroom, real clothing, and treated, at least nominally, as a daughter. But her world remains confined. She is not allowed to go outside, doesn’t know how to read or write, and cannot speak English. At least that’s what the Songolis believe. Before long it becomes clear that young Muna is far cleverer—and her plans more terrifying—than the Songolis, or anyone else, can ever imagine.

 “A dark, disturbing tale told very, very well . . . A taut and harrowing exploration of man’s capacity to inflict pain and cruelty in the complete absence of a moral compass. There are no subplots or extraneous characters to distract from this powerful story . . .”—Terry Zobeck, Washington Independent Review of Books

DIS MEM BER by Joyce Carol Oates

In the title story, a precocious eleven-year-old named Jill is in thrall to an older male relative, the mysterious, attractive black sheep of the family. Without telling her parents, Jill climbs into his sky-blue Chevy to be driven to an uncertain, and unforgettable, fate. In “The Drowned Girl,” a university transfer student becomes increasingly obsessed with the drowning/murder of another female student as her own sense of self begins to deteriorate. In “Great Blue Heron,” a recent widow grieves inside the confines of her lakefront home and fantasizes about transforming into that great flying predator–unerring and pitiless in the hunt. And in the final story, “Welcome to Friendly Skies,” a trusting group of bird-watchers is borne to a remote part of the globe, to a harrowing fate. At the heart of this meticulously crafted, deeply disquieting collection are girls and women confronting the danger around them, and the danger hidden inside their turbulent selves.

 “Oates creates worlds and minds as overwrought and paranoid as anything a female Poe could imagine, then sprinkles her trademark exclamation points licentiously through the interior monologues to heighten the intimacy between ecstasy and madness.”—Kirkus Reviews

See What I Have Done by Sarah Schmidt

In this riveting debut novel, See What I Have Done—which is already gaining outstanding acclaim—Sarah Schmidt recasts one of the most fascinating murder cases of all time into an intimate story of a volatile household and a family devoid of love. On the morning of August 4, 1892, Lizzie Borden calls out to her maid: Someone’s killed Father. The brutal ax-murder of Andrew and Abby Borden in their home in Fall River, Massachusetts, leaves little evidence and many unanswered questions. While neighbors struggle to understand why anyone would want to harm the respected Bordens, those close to the family have a different tale to tell–of a father with an explosive temper; a spiteful stepmother; and two spinster sisters, with a bond even stronger than blood, desperate for their independence.

 “[A] gory and gripping debut.” —Guardian

 

Rabbit Hole by Mark Billingham

 “Alice Armitage is a police officer. Or she was. Or perhaps she just imagines she was. Whatever the truth is, following a debilitating bout of PTSD, self-medication with drink and drugs, and a psychotic breakdown, Alice is now a long-term patient in an acute psychiatric ward. When one of her fellow patients is murdered, Alice becomes convinced that she has identified the killer and that she can catch them. Ignored by the police, she begins her own investigation. But when her prime suspect becomes the second victim, Alice’s life begins to unravel still further as she realizes that she cannot trust anyone, least of all herself.

“A one-of-a-kind narrative and a finale that resolves most matters but preserves a measure of tantalizing ambiguity.”—Wall Street Journal

 

How the Dead Speak by Val McDermid

Val McDermid is an award-winning, crime-writing powerhouse, and now she returns to her explosive, thrilling series featuring psychological profiler Tony Hill and ex-DCI Carol Jordan in her latest How The Dead Speak. With Tony behind bars and Carol finally out of road as a cop, he’s finding unexpected outlets for his talents in jail and she’s joined forces with a small informal group of lawyers and forensics experts looking into suspected miscarriages of justice. But they’re doing it without each other; being in the same room at visiting hour is too painful to contemplate. Meanwhile, construction is suddenly halted on the redevelopment of an orphanage after dozens of skeletons are found buried in the grounds. Forensic examination reveals they date from between twenty and forty years ago, when the nuns were running their repressive regime. But then a different set of skeletons are discovered in a far corner, young men from as recent as ten years ago.

 “Here McDermid is at her finest . . . Insidious Intent is a bold gamble that has the potential to shake long-cherished characters from their emotional complacency and advance the series into uncharted territory.”—Los Angeles Times

 

Cardiff, by the Sea by Joyce Carol Oates

From one of the most important contemporary American writers, Cardiff, by the Sea is a bold, haunting collection of four previously unpublished novellas. In the titular novella, an academic in Pennsylvania discovers a terrifying trauma from her past after inheriting a house in Cardiff, Maine from someone she has never heard of. Mia, the protagonist of “Miao Dao,” is a pubescent girl overcome with loneliness, who befriends a feral cat that becomes her protector from the increasingly aggressive males that surround her. A brilliant but shy college sophomore realizes that she is pregnant in “Phantomwise: 1972.” Distraught, she allows a distinguished visiting professor to take her under his wing, though it quickly becomes evident that he is interested in more than an academic mentorship. Lastly, “The Surviving Child” is Stefan, who was spared when his mother, a famous poet, killed his sister and herself. Stefan’s father remarries, but his young wife is haunted by dead poet’s voice dancing in the wind, an inexplicably befouled well, and a compulsive draw to the same garage that took two lives.

“Consummately well-written, stylistically dashing… forthrightly nightmarish.”—Kirkus Reviews, on Night-Gaunts