Another one from the vault! Here is my post from Halloween 2012!

Every year about this time, I pull together a list of the most spine-tingling books I’ve come across in the preceding year. I confess that they may not be the year’s current crop, but they are the ones I’ve read that I felt were good enough to make the Halloween list. I try to include a classic, a children’s selection, and a current title in each year’s selection. This year, I have only three titles on my Halloween reading list, but they are good ones!

fallofhouseofusherThe Classic
Edgar Allan Poe

Every year I review a classic piece of literature that I feel qualifies as creepy enough for Halloween. I have done Frankenstein and Dracula, and this year, I was at a loss, until I was reading about Baltimore and remembered Poe. My favorite Poe story is “The Cask of Amontillado,” but perhaps his best known story is “The Tell-Tale Heart,” or perhaps the poem “The Raven.” I find all his works spooky and creepy enough to qualify for Halloween reading. Through his “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” and other whodunits, Poe is considered the father of the mystery or detective fiction genre, and as such, The Mystery Writers of America named their highest honor after him.

If you are not familiar with Edgar Allan Poe, this is the perfect time to pick up a collection of his stories, and while away a delicious evening being thoroughly amazed at the sheer inventiveness of his victims’ demises. There are many collections of his works; my copy is called The Fall of the House of Usher and Other Tales, which contains most of his major works. There is also Forgotten Tales and many other iterations.

Can You Survive? Bram Stoker’s Dracula (chapter book)
A Choose Your Path Book, adapted by Ryan Jacobson
Lake7Creative, $8.95
Last year, I read Dracula by Bram Stoker as one of my Halloween reads. I saw this adaptation at the Heartland Fall Forum and just could not resist picking it up. This book will keep kids (both boys and girls) occupied for hours. It is meant for tweens – ages 8-12. How Jacobson fit in the actual text from the classic Dracula into a 172-page book for kids, I will never know (I’m sure that there is a lot of descriptive material cut out). But the kernel of the story is there in all its Gothic glory (age-appropriate, of course).

Every few pages, there is a choice, and one choice leads you through the story, while the other choice – well, you get eaten by wolves or some such fatal ending. It was compelling enough that it had me flipping through both endings and yet I didn’t feel that I lost the thread of the story. Kids who like RL Stine and who are gearing up for Twilight might really enjoy this. Jacobson lives in Mora, MN and has adapted a whole series of classic tales for young readers in this way.

The Night Strangers by Chris Bohjalian
This book was under my Recommended But Not Read section last year. Well, this year, I’m here to tell you that this is the perfect freaky creepy Halloween read. A couple moves to a small village to escape a horrific tragedy – the husband is a pilot, and his plane went down, and let’s just say he didn’t pull a Scully. Turns out the village is full of witches, ghosts, and people curiously ending up dead. Oh, and there’s that door in the basement which is bolted shut with 39 bolts – the exact number of people who died on the plane. This one is full of “Get out!” and “Don’t go in the basement!” moments – and really pulls one on you at the end. I enjoyed it as a ghost story, although I did feel the ending was a bit pat, and rather confusing (fast forward from major climatic event to ten years later and everybody’s happy?). So if you are just willing to go in and have no moralistic objections, this is a good spooky story that will leave you wishing you had not stayed up alone so late.

Last year I included some kids’ stories. There is no such froth this year. It’s simply read or die! You know what you have to do…

 

This article first appeared on Examiner.com in October 2012. All copyright retained by author.