Our October shelf. Haunted houses, bad bargains, and the classics that started it all, from Shirley Jackson and Stephen King to the new writers keeping horror strange.
About this shelf
Start with the houses. Shirley Jackson's The Haunting of Hill House is still the haunted house novel every other one answers to, and We Have Always Lived in the Castle is its stranger, sadder sister. Silvia Moreno-Garcia's Mexican Gothic takes the old gothic mansion to 1950s Mexico and fills its walls with something alive. Grady Hendrix's How to Sell a Haunted House is about a family home full of puppets and grief, and his Horrorstor sets a haunting inside a flat-pack furniture superstore. Marcus Kliewer's We Used to Live Here begins with a knock on the door from the family who used to live in the house.
For the classics, there's Bram Stoker's Dracula, Mary Shelley's Frankenstein in the original 1818 text, and Sheridan Le Fanu's Carmilla, the vampire novella that came twenty-five years before Dracula. Ray Bradbury's The October Country belongs here by name alone, and it earns the place.
For something that will actually scare you: Stephen King's Pet Sematary, William Peter Blatty's The Exorcist, Stephen Graham Jones's The Only Good Indians, and Catriona Ward's The Last House on Needless Street, which is best read knowing as little as possible. And if you want a laugh with your horror, Hendrix's My Best Friend's Exorcism is 1988, a friendship, and a possession.
New to the shelf this October: Edgar Allan Poe's collected works in a leather-bound edition, Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray, Anne Rice's Interview with the Vampire, Mark Z. Danielewski's House of Leaves, Clive Barker's The Hellbound Heart, and T. Kingfisher's What Moves the Dead, her retelling of Poe's "The Fall of the House of Usher."
Orders usually arrive in 5 to 12 business days, so order by Wed, Oct 14 to have your book before Halloween. US shipping is a flat $7 per order.