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This post was originally posted October 14, 2014.

Halloween is right around the corner. There’s no better way to celebrate than by reading books that will scare you to pieces! Here’s a lucky thirteen list of our favorites (all featuring diverse characters or by diverse authors):

1. Half World by Hiromi Goto – Melanie Tamaki lives with her mother in abject poverty. Then, her mother disappears. Melanie must journey to the mysterious Half World to save her.
2. Vodnik by Bryce Moore – Sixteen-year-old Tomas moves back to Slovakia with his family and discovers the folktales of his childhood were more than just stories.
3. The Immortal Rules by Julie Kagawa – Allie Sekemoto survives by scavenging for food by day. She hates the vampires who keep humans like cattle for their food. Until the day she dies and wakes up as a vampire.
4. Liar by Justine Larbalestier – Micah is a liar; it’s the only thing she’ll tell you the truth about. But when her boyfriend Zach is murdered, the whole truth has to come out.
5. Battle Royale by Koushan Takami – A group of junior high school students are sent to an island and forced to fight to the death until only one of them survives.
6. Summer of the Mariposas by Guadalupe Garcia McCall – Odilia and her sisters discover a dead man’s body while swimming in the Rio Grande. They journey across Mexico to return his body in this Odyssey-inspired tale.
7. Devil’s Kiss by Sarwat Chadda – Zombies, ghouls, and vampires all make appearances in the story of Bilquis SanGreal, the youngest and only female member of the Knights Templar.
8. Panic by Sharon Draper – Diamond knows better than to get into a car with a stranger. But when the stranger offers her the chance to dance in a movie, Diamond makes a very wrong decision.
9. Ten by Gretchen McNeil – Ten teens head to a secluded island for an exclusive party…until people start to die. A modern YA retelling of Agatha Christie’s And Then There Were None.
10. Wolf Mark by Joseph Bruchac – Inspired by the Abenaki skinwalker legend, this YA thriller is Burn Notice with werewolves.
11. The Girl from the Well by Rin Chupeco – A dead girl roams the streets, hunting murders. A strange tattooed boy moves to the neighborhood with a deadly secret.
12. 172 Hours on the Moon by Johan Harstad –  Three teenagers win the vacation of a lifetime: a week-long trip to the moon. But something sinister is waiting for them in the black vacuum of space.
13. Anna Dressed in Blood by Kendare Blake – Cas Lowood is a ghost hunter, called to Thunder Bay, Ontario to get rid of a ghost the locals call Anna Dressed in Blood, who has killed every person who has stepped foot in the house she haunts.

What else would you add to the list?

October is one of my favorite months. If you’ve been reading this blog for awhile, you know how much I love scary and spooky things.

In previous posts, I’ve shared some of my favorites from ghost stories to creepy YA books.

So to celebrate the scary season, I thought I would share some of my recent reads and also include books I’ve put on my To-Be-Read (TBR) list.

Some recent spooky books I’ve read:

Servants of the Storm by Delilah S. Dawson
Please Remain Calm by Courtney Summers
The Girl with All the Gifts by M.R. Carey
NOS4A2 by Joe Hill
In the After by Demitria Lunetta
Doctor Sleep by Stephen King

Right now, I’m reading The Southern Reach trilogy by Jeff Vandermeer.

Definitely creepy and glad that all three books are all out. I’m currently reading Authority, which is the second book in the trilogy.

I also have put these books on my ever TBR leaning tower. Most of these are YA but there are some adult titles as well:

Ghost Summer: Stories by Tananarive Due
Bleeding Earth by Kaitlin Ward
A Head Full of Ghosts by Paul Tremblay
Asylum by Madeleine Roux
The Girl from the Well by Rin Chupeco
Slasher Girls & Monster Boys edited by April Genevieve Tucholke

Do you love scary stuff? Have you read anything that kept you up at night? Given you nightmares? Or highly disturbed you? Let me know about it. Haha.

October marks the time of year when I go out of my way to read something scary, and not in a “Why did any publisher support this hot mess of a novel?” way, but in a “When am I ever going to sleep without the lights on again?” kind of way. I haven’t selected this year’s addition to that annual bookshelf, but if I had to choose the scariest book I ever read, I’d pick Jay Anson’s The Amityville Horror.

I know it’s now generally accepted that Amityville is a fake “true story,” but that didn’t make it any easier to descend into the basement after reading the book in the 9th grade. We had an old garage door opener on the wall down there with two red dots that glowed like the eyes of an evil doll, spirit, demon, the Devil, or what have you. The book—absurd as it was in spots—combined with those lights and a creeping dread that my mother’s house might contain a secret red room created a cacophony of horror in my brain, and the side effects manifested in equally absurd habits of safety and precaution for months afterward.

Since that first sample of terror, I became a fan of thrills, chills, and things that go bump in the night—be it eerie fiction, true crime, or the paranormal unknown—and when deciding what book to tackle this October, I grew curious about what other authors and editors I know would select as the scariest book they ever read, and so I asked…

What was the scariest book you’ve ever read, and how did it affect your writing and/or your life after you put the book back on the shelf?  

“Helter Skelter, by Vincent Bugliosi. When I was a kid, my best friend didn’t read fiction, and I rarely read nonfiction, so we made a pact to exchange books we each thought the other would like. I gave him IT. He gave me Helter Skelter, Vincent Bugliosi’s account of the Manson Family murders. No offense to Stephen King, but Helter Skelter messed me up in ways IT never could. Both books deal with the madness that lurks beneath the thin veneer of modern society—but while King wrote of monsters, Bugliosi convinced me that the monsters were us.”

– Chris F. Holm

“It was the right book at the right time—1968: I was 22, doing my student teaching, and my supervising teacher lent me I Am Legend by Richard Matheson. Utter claustrophobic terror—zombie-vampires—some of whom might happen to be your friends, loved ones, etc., back from the dead to get you. I’d read and loved Matheson’s collections of short horror stories, but this short novel built the nightmare and sustained it and sustained it until you were saying, “I want out of this” even as you knew you’d stick with it to the bitter yet triumphant end. Once I knew that a “modern writer” could do it without ghosts or ghoulies or an English moor and Gothic trappings, I was there. It was an epiphany, and strengthened the desire I’d had to write horror, which began in grade school with “The Pit and Pendulum” and “Tell Tale Heart.”

– Mort Castle

“The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood horrified me. The scariest part is that it becomes more and more evident that Atwood may have been forecasting the future of the North American female experience. The thing I take with me after I set it down is always the same: I should keep writing my experience, and never let the bastards shut me up.”

– Dena Rash Guzman

“Aside from the user’s manual for the first printer I got, I’d say the scariest book I ever read was James Dickey’s Deliverance. I was really too young when I first read it (about 14). My mom, a high school English teacher, had brought it home and told me not to read it, so of course I grabbed it and read it in secret as soon as I could. The impact on me was: the world is a much more dangerous place than I’d thought. Since then, as an author, I’ve remembered it and tried to write as well and as frankly as Dickey. And to not shy away from uncomfortable scenes and topics!”

– Elizabeth Sims

“Horror’s like Erotica—imagination is key. Don’t rob it by giving every last grisly detail. Exercise some subtlety and restraint. As a writer, I learned this and more from Henry James’ truly haunting The Turn of the Screw.”

– David Comfort

As you can see from the answers above, there are all kinds of ways we can scare ourselves—everything from hack-and-slash stories to tales that make us see the horror in our ourselves and in our potential futures. Tell us what you think in the comments below…did we select your favorite frightful tome? Is nonfiction scarier than fiction? Is there a book we should consider reading that will keep us awake in the dead of night?

–

James Duncan is a content editor for Writer’s Digest. He is also the author of The Cards We Keep: Ten Stories

I’m lucky enough to have the same agent (the AMAZING Sara Crowe!) as Jonathan Maberry, so I couldn’t wait to read his latest book, DEAD OF NIGHT. Did I mention he’s featured in the upcoming History Channel Documentary, ZOMBIES: A LIVING HISTORY?

Pretty cool, eh?

Okay.  I must admit, as much as I enjoy a good horror novel, I’ve read a few zombie yarns by other authors that left me…ahem…cold. The formulaic lab outbreak, the shambling hordes, the lone pack of stereotypical survivors, etc. Been there, done that.

Bought the (shredded, blood splattered) t-shirt.

Jonathan Maberry’s DEAD OF NIGHT, however, is a terrific departure from this formula. He injects the novel novel with all the elements I crave in a scary, hairy good book. DEAD OF NIGHT has it all. A compelling heroine. In your face action. Terrifying horror. And real literary heft. If you enjoyed the rich characterization in THE STAND, if you ate up the action and twists in THE WALKING DEAD, then you’ll love this book, too.

The term ‘roller-coaster ride’ gets thrown around a lot in reviews, but it’s truly apt for DEAD OF NIGHT. When the opening chapter starts off (with a bite, I might add), it’s a little like the hydraulic snap of the safety restraint on a coaster car.

Click…click…click...We come to know and care about the characters...Click…click…click…We’re afraid for Dez and JT…We need to see them through this.

At the top of the white knuckle climb, the bottom drops out and the plot roars into a frightening descent. Oh yes, there is blood and jagged teeth. But the most terrifying moments aren’t wrought from gore–Maberry infuses real fear into the narrative. Readers are pulled under the shivering skin, into the minds of his characters.

We’re Billy Trout, the calloused newshound. We are Volker, the doctor who releases hell on earth. Most of all, we are Dez, the last cop standing, the woman with her back against the wall. When she’s forced to shoot a lost zombie child, we feel the painful trigger squeeze. We know Dez’s bravado is “thin & fragile, nailed to the walls of her heart by rusty pins.”

“But here, for a fragment of a moment, Dez thought that she caught the flicker of something else; it was as if she looked through the grimed glass of a haunted house and saw the pale, pleading face of a ghost. In the second before the thing lunged at her, Dez saw the shadow of the little girl screaming at her from the endless darkness…

…The screaming face of the little girl, trapped inside the mindless thing that had been her, was worse than anything. Worse than even all the voices screaming inside Desdemona Fox’s head.

So Dez screamed, too.

And with a movement as fluid and fast as if she had been practicing her whole life for this single moment, Dez drew her glock and pointed and fired straight and true and blew out the lights in the haunted house…“

WOW.

Dez faces inhuman evil and almost insurmountable odds. After reading the last one hundred pages, the story jolts to its inexorable stop. The reader is left to wonder, is this how the world ends? Not with a bang, but with a bite?

Hungry for