Reading Challenge: Scare your pants off

Are you up for a challenge? Because we’ve got one for you. How about reading a horror story in honor of Halloween? Classic horror, gory horror, audio horror, downloaded horror (as in downloaded books) — you name it, and if it’s scary, it counts for this month’s Reading Challenge.

But which scary story to read? One of our Fiction librarians has some suggestions in an earlier post today on New Horror to Keep You Up at Night and in this post on 2008 horror titles. And right this second there’s a copy of Heart-Shaped Box by Joe Hill (Stephen King’s son, by the way) on the shelf waiting for you.  For woo-woo unsettling subtle horror, Thomas Tryon’s The Other is a great revived read. For Texas Chainsaw style how-much-can-you-take style horror, Joe Lansdale’s God of the Razor is about the limit. We got a neat new story collection called American Supernatural Tales or something that is nifty for Hallowe’en.eddie munster The recent graphic novel Necronomicon is a great creepfest. What? You want something right this second? Within the Shadows by Brandon Massey is  an eAudio that you can download immediately.

Need more? Drop us a line at Shelf Talk (shelftalk@spl.org) and we’ll have a librarian get back to you. And of course, leave a comment here with your horrific suggestions — and your progress on accepting our October Reading Challenge.

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3 responses to “Reading Challenge: Scare your pants off”

  1. Anne

    Wooooo, how fun!

    Reply
  2. Larry La Caille

    Lots of scary sounding suggestions. I would like to add the Henry James classic “Turn of the Screw” about the governess and two strange kids in a mansion in the UK It has been filmed more than once. A version called “The Innocents” with Deborah Kerr as the governess is quite creepy.

    Reply
  3. jay f

    “The Exorcist” by Blatty. An oldie but a goodie. If you’ve only seen the movie and think -that’s- scary, read the book, it’ll terrify.

    Ah, the Necronomicon. Historically fun stuff there. A product of a reference in an HP Lovecraft story back in the 20’s that folks thought was a real book. Eventually Lovecraft wrote a ‘history’ of the work as other writers were picking it up in their writing. A writer has to keep his universe in order of course.

    While the new graphic Necronomicon we just got here at SPL is nice, I particularly love HR Giger’s version from 1991. (He’s the guy that did the set design for the ‘Alien’ and ‘Blade Runner’ movies. Bio-mechanoid art.)

    If you’re particularly eclectic and want a meta-philosophical scare, try Dante’s Inferno. It can be a hard read as it’s not only 14th century poetry, but translated from the Italian for good measure. If you pick up the entire Divine Comedy then, after Holloween you can flip back to Paradisio to get you ready for Thanksgiving and Xmas!

    Reply

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