8 Must-Read Spooky Books Perfect For Evenings In The Fall

Liz had thought she left her nightmares to rot in Jonestown, PA, but her best friend’s wedding has Liz dragging her heels back for a reluctant homecoming to the place where she buried her nightmares. It’s only a weekend. What can go wrong?

Liz quickly realizes that buried doesn’t mean dead, and her nightmares are revitalized when Caroline, a young black girl, goes missing in the woods. 

Nobody wants to admit that Johnstown has a history of slaughtering black girls as they search for the woods’ newest victim. They just want Caroline to come home. But the only way to find Caroline is to confront the racist history that haunts this town, and Liz is determined to find her friend’s daughter at any cost. Even if it means facing the fears she thought she’d left behind.

Hell Follows With Us meets Midsommar in this debut YA horror coming out this fall. If you’re looking for another reason to be afraid of the woods, this is the book for you.

Max and Erin are exes road-tripping to the West coast in search of a trans-friendly home, only to end up stranded in a small town abutting the cryptid-infested woods. 

A monster hiding amongst the trees survives on a diet of sacrificed girls, and the town is quick to pick the new arrivals to send into the monster’s maw.

Too bad both Max and Erin are trans. How does one define “girl” when the answer means death?

If you’re not a plucky white girl with a gender-neutral name, your odds of surviving a horror scenario are slim. 

This anthology turns the first kill trope of slaughtering marginalized characters on its head with a line-up of authors to die for. 

Stories by Alexis Henderson (House of Hunger), Tiffany D. Jackson (White Smoke), and Lemar Giles (The Getaway) all together in one book? Say no more.

In this amazing anthology, marginalized horror fans take their power back from the genre and band together against a common enemy: white people.

If you’re a fan of genre-aware murder romps like Scream, this is the perfect book for you. 

A Halloween party goes astray in There’s No Way I’d Die First, when Noelle’s attempt to launch a podcast spin-off of her popular movie club is put on hold when the killer clown she hired turns out to be exactly that: a killer. 

Now her guests are finding their ends in classic horror-movie deaths, and Noelle has to keep her head straight if she doesn’t want to lose it. Unlucky for her, this clown’s got a bag of tricks sure to make anyone scream.

I Was a Teenage Slasher is for everyone who’s obsessed with 80s slasher films and true-crime documentaries. 

This novel is a fictional autobiography of a serial killer, relaying the events that led to him snapping. Jones takes a deep look at the inner workings of a killer and the classic slasher tropes that dominate the genre.

Tolly is an average guy... That is, he’s average until he becomes notarized in slasher infamy when he starts killing his classmates. There’s blood, there’s gore, and of course there’s a final girl. 

If you love reading about the inner workings of a villain—or even just a meta commentary on horror trope staples—then this is the book to die for.

Tranquil Falls is supposed to be Sarah Carpenter's escape. After fleeing from her narcissistic ex and abusive mother, Sarah seeks out the artist colony in an effort to reclaim her life and focus on what really matters: art. 

Only losing herself in pottery proves to be difficult when Sarah finds the body of a woman buried where she’s trying to make a pit kiln.

This heart-pounding atmospheric novel follows Sarah as she tries to uncover the mystery of Tranquil Falls while trying to keep a grip on her quickly crumbling sense of reality.

This book is for lost media fiends. Val used to be a member of the Circle of Friends, a group of children starring on the TV show Mister Magic. After a tragic accident that may or may not have left one of the children dead, production shut down thirty years ago. 

Despite there being no evidence that this show ever existed... The viewers remember. Even if Val doesn’t. So when former castmates show up at her father’s funeral, Val’s quick to disregard their request for her to do a reunion show. Except with her father gone, it’s harder for Val to ignore the blank space that exists where her childhood memories should be.

Haunted houses are a spooky season staple for a reason. White Smoke is The Haunting of Hill House meets When No One is Watching. You can probably guess how the book starts:

A family looking to make a fresh start moves into an old house filled with weird smells and bad vibes. Settling foundations can’t explain the bumps in the night, and Marigold’s new stepsister seems out to get her.

Mari quickly learns that this haunting is bigger than her new house. The town is haunted, too, with secrets bigger than ghosts.