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To celebrate Halloween and All Hallow’s Read, we’ve rounded up 25 free horror books that you can download right now for your eReader, smartphone or tablet. Follow the links below to read…

In 2010, novelist Neil Gaiman created the “All Hallow’s Read,” literary holiday, a night to give someone you love a scary book. The writer explained the new tradition in the video embedded above–here’s more from the official site:

Obviously, we support bookshops and authors, but more than that, this is about making a holiday tradition of book-giving. So feel free to give second-hand books or books from your own shelves. And feel just as free to buy a beautiful new book from a small independent bookseller, or from online or… look, there’s no wrong way to buy a book. You can even gift it to their Kindle … If you do not know what scary book to give someone, talk to a bookseller or a librarian. They like to help. Librarians will not mind even if you admit that you are not planning to take out a book, but instead you are going to buy one and give it to someone.

continued…

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We’re celebrating World Theatre Day with an excerpt from Gaston Leroux’s masterpiece The Phantom of the Opera. A mysterious Phantom haunts the depths of the Paris Opera House where he has fallen passionately in love with the beautiful singer Christine Daaé. Under his guidance her singing rises to new heights and she is triumphantly acclaimed. But Christine is also loved by Raoul de Chagny, and by returning his love she makes the fiend she knows as the Angel of Music mad with jealousy. When the Phantom is finally unmasked, will Christine see beyond his hideous disfigurement?

Then they were outside, on the roof. Christine moved easily, with practised steps, as light as a swallow. They looked through the empty spaces between the three low domes and the triangular pediment. She breathed deeply as she gazed out over Paris which nestled in a valley grimly steeped in toil. She looked trustingly at Raoul, told him to come closer, and arm in arm they strolled along lead-paved streets and down iron avenues. They paraded their twin reflections in the great tanks of standing water where youngsters from the beginners’ class, a score of little boys, splash about and learn to swim in the summer months.

The shadow behind them, still dogging their steps, had emerged too, flattening itself against roofs, growing longer each time it flapped its black wings where iron roads met, skirting the cisterns, silently circling the domes. The hapless couple never suspected it was there when they sat down, feeling safe at last under the high protection of Apollo who raised his mighty bronze lyre to a sky filled with crimson fire.

They were enveloped in a blazing spring evening. Clouds which had just donned the sunset’s gift of gold and scarlet glided slowly overhead and trailed their diaphanous robes over the two young people. Christine said:

‘Soon, we’ll go much further and faster than clouds, to the end of the world, and then you can leave me, Raoul. But when the time comes for you to take me away and I refuse to go, swear, Raoul, that you will make me!’

Clinging anxiously to him, she uttered the words with an insistence that was directed against herself and they struck Raoul forcefully. ‘Why? Afraid you might change your mind, Christine?’

‘I don’t know,’ she said, shaking her head in an odd way. ‘He’s a devil!’

She shivered, groaned and nestled in his arms.

‘What I’m afraid of now is going back to live with him — under the earth!’

‘Why do you feel you have to go back?’

‘If I don’t go back to him, terrible things might happen!… But I can’t do it!… I really can’t!… I know we’re supposed to feel sorry for people unfortunate enough to have to live under ground… But he’s too horrible! Yet it will soon be time; I’ve just one day left, and if I don’t go to him he’ll come looking for me with his Voice. He’ll drag me down to his sanctuary, deep underground, and he’ll go down on his knees to me, with that skull instead of a head, and say he loves me and he’ll cry! Dear God, his tears, Raoul! His tears running from two black sockets! I couldn’t bear to see him cry again!’

She wrung her hands in anguish while Raoul, finding her despair contagious, held her close:

‘No! You shan’t hear him say he loves you! You shan’t see him shed those tears! Let’s go away!… Let’s run away, Christine, tonight!’

And he started to drag her away then and there.

But she stopped him.

‘No,’ she said, shaking her head sadly, ‘it would be too cruel… Let him hear me sing once more tomorrow night, just one last time… and then we’ll go. Come for me in my dressing room tomorrow night, on the stroke of twelve. He’ll be waiting for me in the dining room by his lake… We shall be free and you shall take me away from here… even if I refuse