Halloween BOOk Recommendations!
24th October 2019
Like the supernatural creature that has been hiding in your garage, waiting for you to turn the lights off and get in to bed, Halloween is fast approaching, and what better way to celebrate this spooky season than curl up with a good book (after you’ve barricaded yourself in the bathroom that is).
We’ve put our collective heads together to form some sort of horrendous many-eyed beast, and while we may look like something from one of Lovecraft’s dreams, our book knowledge has combined, and we’ve created a list of some of the best horror-filled books we can think of in our collection!
So grab yourself a book or two, board up your windows, nail the doors shut and get ready for a bloody great Halloween!
Nyctophobia
Newly-married architect Callie and her wealthy husband Mateo move to Hyperion House, a grand old home in southern Spain. It’s an eccentric place built in front of a cliff: serene and beautiful, but eerily symmetrical, and cunningly styled so that half the house is flooded with light, and half locked up and neglected is shrouded in darkness. Unemployed and feeling isolated in a foreign country, Callie determines to research the history of the curious building. But the past is sometimes best left alone. Uncovering the folklore of the house’s strange history, Callie is drawn into darkness and delusion. As a teenager Callie was afraid of the dark, and now with her adolescent nyctophobia returning she becomes convinced there’s someone in the darkened rooms. Somewhere in the darkness lies the truth about Hyperion House…
Three Stories About Ghosts
Three standalone novellas, telling three chilling ghost stories, by three of the finest new voices in fiction. A full-time medium and part-time cook is recruited by the nightmarish Boneman to hunt down and destroy a monster… Two children of warring houses, in a city-state ruled by the noble houses long-dead ancestors, fall in love… In a hidden college in America, a man and the shade of his wife seek out the answers behind her death…
The Complete Double Dead
You wouldn’t like Coburn. People don’t, as a rule. And that’s okay, because he doesn’t like people much either. People are food. Five years ago, Coburn went to sleep wasn’t exactly planned and he’s just woken up to find most everybody in the world dead. Not dead like him; he looks human, drinks blood. He’s smart. They’re… none of those things. They outnumber him by about a million to one, and their clotted blood cannot sustain him. Now he’s starving, and on the run. He has to find blood, soon, and like it or not he’s gonna have to keep an eye on the frail flesh-bags he finds it in. Time for the wolf to turn shepherd. No, Coburn doesn’t like people. But he’ll have to learn to. The Complete Double Dead collects Chuck Wendig’s debut novel and the follow-up novella, Bad Blood. Follow Coburn as he runs a gauntlet of supermarket cannibals, juggalos, super-zombies, and a ketamine-trip cult of zombie-worshipping New Age weirdos. On the way, he’ll become something entirely new.
The Outcast Hours
We live our lives in the daylight. Our stories take place under the sun: bright, clear, unafraid. ,This is not a book of those stories. These are the stories of people who live at night; under neon and starlight, and never the light of day. These are the stories of poets and police; writers and waiters; gamers and goddesses; tourists and traders; the hidden and the forbidden; the lonely and the lovers. These are their lives. These are their stories. And this is their time: The Outcast Hours.
Burning Sky
Trained To Kill. Haunted By The Past. Fighting For Their Souls. Everything is dangerous in Afghanistan, nothing more so than the mission of a Tactical Support Team or T.S.T. All veterans, these men and women spend seasons in hell, to not only try and fix what’s broken in each of them, but also to make enough bank to change their fortunes. But seven months later, safely back on American soil, they feel like there’s something left undone. They’re meeting people who already know them, remembering things that haven’t happened, hearing words that don’t exist. And they’re all having the same dream… a dream of a sky that won’t stop burning.
Ubo
Daniel is trapped in Ubo. He has no idea how long he has been imprisoned there by the roaches. Every resident has a similar memory of the journey: a dream of dry, chitinous wings crossing the moon, the gigantic insects dropping swiftly over the houses; the creatures, like a deck of baroquely ornamented cards, fanning themselves from one hidden world into the next.
And now each day they force Daniel to play a different figure from humanity’s violent history, from a frenzied Jack the Ripper to a stumbling and confused Stalin, to a self-proclaimed god executing survivors atop the ruins of the world. As skies burn and prisoners go mad, identities dissolve as the experiments evolve, and no one can foretell their mysterious end.
The Death and Life of Schneider Wrack
Schneider Wrack was never a dissident. He doesn’t think. But he’s been convicted as a dissident, and in the ancient city of Lipos-Tholos, at the heart of the star-spanning Lemniscatus, the sentence for sedition is death. Death, and then reanimation, shipped out to vast whaling ships on the terrible world of Ocean, to work until you fall apart – or something gets you. And now Schneider has woken up, trapped in rotting limbs and a fading brain, arm-deep in the fat and stinking meat of a colossus, and he’s not happy. From its unsteady start in the stench and brine of Ocean to its perilous quest through the jungle world of Grand Amazon, Schneider’s revolution will never be particularly fun or easy, but sometimes a zombie’s gotta do what a zombie’s gotta do. It’s time to bring Hell to the City.
The Faceless
In the Lancashire town of Kempforth, people are vanishing. Mist hangs heavy in the streets, and in those mists move the masked figures the local kids call the Spindly Men. When two year old Roseanne Trevor disappears, Detective Chief Inspector Renwick vows to stop at nothing until she finds her. In Manchester, terrifying visions summon TV psychic Allen Cowell and his sister Vera back to the town they swore they’d left forever. And local historian Anna Mason pieces together a history of cruelty and exploitation almost beyond belief, born out of the horrors of war while in the decaying corridors and lightless rooms of a long abandoned hospital, something terrible is waiting for them all.
Hell Train
Imagine there was a supernatural chiller that Hammer Films never made. A grand epic produced at the studio’s peak, which played like a cross between the Dracula and Frankenstein films and Dr Terror’s House Of Horrors… Four passengers meet on a train journeying through Eastern Europe during the First World War, and face a mystery that must be solved if they are to survive. As the Arkangel races through the war-torn countryside, they must find out: What is in the casket that everyone is so afraid of? What is the tragic secret of the veiled Red Countess who travels with them? Why is their fellow passenger the army brigadier so feared by his own men? And what exactly is the devilish secret of the Arkangel itself? Bizarre creatures, satanic rites, terrified passengers and the romance of travelling by train, all in a classically styled horror novel.