The Creepy Book You Should Read Tonight
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Halloween happens to fall on a Thursday night this year, and you probably got all your parties out of the way last weekend. You know what that means: just stay in tonight and read a creepy book. Here are four recommendations, from a historical haunted house tale to horror in the suburbs.
A Sunny Place for Shady People by Mariana Enriquez
This collection is perfect to read with all the lights in your apartment off except one, alone, alert to every noise, ensuring you’ll be unable to sleep after the last page is finished (complimentary). My favorite story is “Different Colors Made of Tears,” in which a rich old man sells his dead wife’s beautiful old dresses to a consignment store. The store’s employees are unable to resist trying them on, but when they do, something disgusting and bizarre happens. My second favorite is “Night Birds,” about a girl who lives, or maybe that’s not quite the right word, in a decaying mansion, watching her sister, Millie, who may or may not be imagining her existence. —Emily Gould
The Library at Mount Char by Scott Hawkins
This book is set (among many other places and universes) horrifyingly in suburbia — and one of my favorite things about classic horror and spookiness is porches and kitchens and people making brownies unknowingly or robotically and having to run up the stairs to hide. Come for the story of children abducted from a happy suburb, stay for the terrifying fact that we don’t know the rules of this world or any other! —Choire Sicha, editor-at-large, New York
Heart-Shaped Box by Joe Hill
I made the mistake of picking up Joe Hill’s debut novel at an airport while traveling solo. His story about a washed-up rock star being haunted by a dead man’s suit is so delightfully creepy I finished it overnight — mostly because I was so scared I couldn’t sleep. —Emily Heller, recommendations editor, Vulture
Those Across the River by Christopher Buehlman
Despite a dire warning, a World War I vet and his wife leave Chicago to move into a family house he inherits in the Deep South. Not far from the sweet yellow house is the plantation land his monstrously cruel great-grandfather owned before he was killed in a slave uprising. Can you believe that this eerie Southern Gothic takes a turn for the terrifying? The unseasonably warm weather we’ve been having on the East Coast sets the mood for the sweaty, swampy horror that unfolds here. —Tolly Wright, updates editor, Vulture