books for halloween (again)

wouldn’t you like to read something strange?

I don’t really care for most of the “Best Books for Halloween” lists out there, because they tend to miss the spirit of Halloween. Frankenstein is a wonderful Gothic novel, but it is not a good book for Halloween. Halloween wraps horror and smalltown Gothic in mischief and chaos, and it’s surprisingly hard to find books (or any media) that do the same.

Here are a few.

Beats of Burden, Evan Dorkin and Jill Thompson

The Beasts of Burden comic series is purestrain suburban gothic. Centered on a group of dogs (and cat) who solve supernatural mysteries in Anywhere, USA, writer Evan Dorkin uses a children’s-movie sounding plot and a usually light tone to make the comics’ frequent and abrupt turns into horrifying darkness all the more shocking and tragic.

Like this

Jill Thompson’s watercolor art is gorgeous; she swings between the idyllic and the genuinely upsetting with equal comfort. This series is a hidden gem that no one seems to know about — check it out.

Dark Harvest, Norman Partridge

This book’s unexciting title belies its pure chaotic autumn energy (though its killer cover art makes up for it). It’s Halloween, 1963, and the pumpkin-headed October Boy has risen from the cornfields as he does every year. As they do every year, the town’s teenagers - locked inside their rooms for days to make sure they’re ravenous for the candy bars stuffed in the October Boy’s vine-and-twig frame - are loosed at sunset to hunt him down. Only one will succeed and be rewarded with the ultimate prize: a ticket out of the sleepy midwestern town. You know, probably.

Partridge’s Dark Harvest is, without exaggeration, the best Halloween book to see print since Kennedy was in office. It’s also being made into a film.

Something Wicked This Way Comes, Ray Bradbury

This is not a good cover, but it’s the cover of the book I bought when I was 14, so it’s the one we’re going with..

This is The Halloween Book. This is The One. It is Halloween, in A Book. It’s idyllic small town America, it’s the 50s or something, Twitter and climate change haven’t been invented yet, and a dark carnival comes to town. It starts like this:

First of all, it was October, a rare month for boys. Not that all months aren’t rare. But there be bad and good, as the pirates say. Take September, a bad month: school begins. Consider August, a good month: school hasn’t begun yet. July, well, July’s really fine: there’s no chance in the world for school. June, no doubting it, June’s best of all, for the school doors spring wide and September’s a billion years away.

But you take October, now. School’s been on a month and you’re riding easier in the reins, jogging along. You got time to think of the garbage you’ll dump on old man Prickett’s porch, or the hairy-ape costume you’ll wear to the YMCA the last night of the month. And if it’s around October twentieth and everything smoky-smelling and the sky orange and ash gray at twilight, it seems Halloween will never come in a fall of broomsticks and a soft flap of bedsheets around corners.

The Graveyard Book, Neil Gaiman

Gaiman’s Graveyard Book is an unsubtle spin on Kipling’s Jungle Book, where instead of a boy raised in the jungle by animals it’s a boy raised in a graveyard by ghosts. It’s YA writing at its best (and Gaiman at his), channeling the weird magic of the preteen years and binding it to shadows of real darkness.

We Have Always Lived in the Castle, Shirley Jackson

Everyone knows Hill House, but We Have Always Lived in the Castle is maybe Jackson’s most American Gothic work. In the aftermath of the sugar bowl incident which resulted in the deaths of nearly the entire Blackwood family, Merricat and her sister Constance live (almost) alone in their crumbling family manor. In the woods and the fields, Merricat crafts charms and witchbanes to ward off the outside world, but everything changes when their cousin comes to visit, seeking marriage and fortune. It’s grim and melancholic, but Merricat’s Wednesday Adams-esque narration keeps things on the right side of Halloween’s mischievous side.

Haunted Nights, ed. by Ellen Datlow and Lisa Morton

A good little Halloween-themed anthology featuring writers like Brian Evenson and Stephen Graham Jones, two of the best out there at the moment.

Harrow County, Cullen Bunn and Tyler Crook

Since we opened this list with a suburban gothic graphic novel, we’ll close it with a southern gothic graphic novel. Like Beasts of Burden, Harrow County is illustrated in gorgeous watercolor. Set in the early 20th century, Harrow County starts with the story of Emily, who lives on a farm and may be an evil witch reborn.

Honorable Mention: Lincoln in the Bardo, George Saunders

Maybe too much of a meditation on loss and America to sit alongside the Gothic and frenetic books above, Saunders’ Lincoln in the Bardo is nonetheless a deeply strange and funny story about the days following the death of young Willie Lincoln, son of Abraham. Willie’s been laid to rest in an autumnal cemetery full of ghosts who refuse to accept that they are dead, and who sometimes have too many arms and/or eyes, or are haunted by gelatinous orbs, etc. Shades of Edgar Lee Masters’ Spoon River Anthology (another great autumn read, if not perhaps a Halloween one) throughout.

If you’ve got suggestions for other Halloween books that fit this kind of vague vibe, let me know in the comments!

Also, check out my Halloween playlist on Spotify!