Books that are supposed to scare you, and do. Some of it is supernatural, some of it is the ordinary world turned slightly wrong, and a few of these will stay with you longer than you'd like.
About this shelf
Stephen King is here with Carrie, his first novel, and The Long Walk, the grim contest he wrote as Richard Bachman, in both hardcover and paperback. Ray Bradbury's The October Country is his darkest story collection, full of carnivals, cellars, and small towns where something has quietly gone wrong. Max Brooks's World War Z tells the zombie apocalypse as an oral history, and it is far scarier for being told calmly.
For something newer, Chuck Tingle's Bury Your Gays is a Hollywood slasher with real anger underneath, Carmen Maria Machado's Her Body and Other Parties mixes horror with fairy tale, and Cynthia Gómez's Muñeca is a queer Latine gothic about a house that rearranges itself. Mason Coile's Driven and Exiles bring horror to science fiction, and Ira Levin's The Stepford Wives is the suburban nightmare that gave the language a new word.
Some titles here contain graphic violence or explicit content, and each product page says so plainly. For more autumn reading, see our guide to gothic books for October.
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