Reading Recommendations: Spooktastic Reads 2024
It’s that time of the year again where horror films reign, kids go trick or treating, and candy is everywhere! Since Halloween is coming up later this month, I’ve compiled yet another list of creepy novels to satisfy your horror cravings. Each book has its own horror rating, from one to three ghosts:
Enjoy these spooky tales to fill your night with fright! See last year’s recommendations here!
Ruin Road
Cade Webster lives between worlds. He’s a standout football star at the right school but lives in the wrong neighborhood–if you let his classmates tell it. Everywhere but home, people are afraid of him for one reason or another. Afraid he’s too big, too fast, too ambitious, too Black.
Then one fateful night, to avoid a dangerous encounter with the police, he ducks into a pawn shop. An impulse purchase and misspoken desire change everything when Cade tells the shopkeeper he wishes people would stop acting so scared around him, and the wish is granted…
At first, it feels like things have taken a turn for the better. But it’s not just Cade that people no longer fear–it’s everything. With Cade spreading this newfound “courage” wherever he goes, anything can happen. Fearless acts of violence begin to escalate in both his neighborhood and at school. Something monstrous is clearly at work and it’s up to Cade to stop it. But just what did he buy and what’s the price to undo the damage? After all, the devil’s in the details.
This novel is based on the concept of “be careful what you wish for” while also discussing topics of race relations, grief, gentrification, and racial profiling. It packs a powerful punch the way that race plays a part in the novel and rips the band-aid off to showing the problems with racial equality and how far we’ve progressed as a society. Many harsh truths are unveiled and Cade’s wish a deep desire not to just belong, but to having people stop living in fear of him. I felt the the horror and supernatural elements blended well together in this novel. I enjoyed the setting of a ominous, mysterious pawn shop with magical items” and a well-written villain (Skinner) who lurks in the shadows, appearing at any moment.
Shutter
Micheline Helsing is a tetrachromat-a girl who sees the auras of the undead in a prismatic spectrum. As one of the last descendants of the Van Helsing lineage, she has trained since childhood to destroy monsters both corporeal and spiritual: the corporeal undead go down by the bullet, the spiritual undead by the lens. With an analog SLR camera as her best weapon, Micheline exorcises ghosts by capturing their spiritual energy on film. She’s aided by her crew: Oliver, a techno-whiz and the boy who developed her camera’s technology; Jude, who can predict death; and Ryder, the boy Micheline has known and loved forever.
When a routine ghost hunt goes awry, Micheline and the boys are infected with a curse known as a soulchain. As the ghostly chains spread through their bodies, Micheline learns that if she doesn’t exorcise her entity in seven days or less, she and her friends will die. Now pursued as a renegade agent by her monster-hunting father, Leonard Helsing, she must track and destroy an entity more powerful than anything she’s faced before . . . or die trying.
This novel is a thrilling read that has an eerie atmosphere and many things that go bump in the night. It was pretty spooky and descriptive and the horror elements added to the experience. Though fast-paced I feel like the novel lagged at times, but overall has smooth pacing. The supernatural aspects along with the ghosts hunting action scenes that was the most exciting part especially when it came time for Micheline and the crew to face off against foes.
Haunting of Leigh Harker
Leigh Harker’s quiet suburban home was her sanctuary for more than a decade, until things abruptly changed. Curtains open by themselves. Radios turn off and on. And a dark figure looms in the shadows of her bedroom door at night, watching her, waiting for her to finally let down her guard enough to fall asleep.
Pushed to her limits but unwilling to abandon her home, Leigh struggles to find answers. But each step forces her towards something more terrifying than she ever imagined.
A poisonous shadow seeps from the locked door beneath the stairs. The handle rattles through the night and fingernails scratch at the wood. Her home harbors dangerous secrets, and now that Leigh is trapped within its walls, she fears she may never escape.
It wouldn’t be spooky season without a Coates horror recommendation! This novel takes the traditional haunted house ghost trope and spins into something new. The story’s setting is chilling and the mystery elements have the reader engaged with the story at all times. I enjoyed that the plot twists threw me for a loop and a few times caught me off guard too. Like all of Coates novels she creates a haunting atmosphere which adds to the plot’s horror elements.
The Hacienda
In the overthrow of the Mexican government, Beatriz’s father is executed and her home destroyed. When handsome Don Rodolfo Solórzano proposes, Beatriz ignores the rumors surrounding his first wife’s sudden demise, choosing instead to seize the security his estate in the countryside provides. She will have her own home again, no matter the cost.
But Hacienda San Isidro is not the sanctuary she imagined.
When Rodolfo returns to work in the capital, visions and voices invade Beatriz’s sleep. The weight of invisible eyes follows her every move. Rodolfo’s sister, Juana, scoffs at Beatriz’s fears—but why does she refuse to enter the house at night? Why does the cook burn copal incense at the edge of the kitchen and mark its doorway with strange symbols? What really happened to the first Doña Solórzano?
Beatriz only knows two things for certain: Something is wrong with the hacienda. And no one there will help her.
Desperate for help, she clings to the young priest, Padre Andrés, as an ally. No ordinary priest, Andrés will have to rely on his skills as a witch to fight off the malevolent presence haunting the hacienda and protect the woman for whom he feels a powerful, forbidden attraction. But even he might not be enough to battle the darkness.
If gothic horror is more up your alley, then The Hacienda is the novel for you! It provides for a highly immersive reading experience that sends chills down your spine. The story is rich in culture and history, providing me with knowledge of events I wasn’t too familiar with. The house itself is the best “character” in this novel and through Cañas’s writing it stuck with me long after reading the book (its absolutely terrifying!) I enjoyed that the story was a good blend of horror, romance, and suspense while tacking multiple themes throughout its narrative. The descriptions felt so vivid and this story had me so scared at some parts!
Portrait of a Shadow
Inez is missing, but missing things can always be found.
Mae knows this as a fact, even though the police investigation has come to a standstill, even though her parents are moving on. But when she goes to clear out her older sister’s studio, she finds a mess of research and a white canvas that seems even older than the ornate frame it is set in. The closer Mae gets to the canvas, the more difficult it is to pull her eyes away from its mottled surface, its heavy layers of white paint, its peeling top corner she is tempted to pull to see what’s beneath. But she doesn’t. Not yet.
Mae decides to trace her sister’s last steps in the hopes of finding answers, certain that Inez’s disappearance is related to the painting. And she knows she is desperate enough to let the strange boy who claims to have been Inez’s neighbor tag along. Even if his good looks don’t help distract from his avoidance of her questions. So begins a scavenger hunt piecing together what they can find from what Inez left behind. One that leads to centuries-old questions best left unasked and secrets best kept in the dark.
What a chilling and suspenseful read that Metoui has crafted in this novel! Metoui takes her readers on an arduous journey full of entangled secrets from the past in this plot. Her writing is detailed, yet vague enough in certain parts that it doesn’t give all the answers away too quickly. I was thoroughly engrossed in the plot, and I appreciated the winding road that the story presents in this novel. Being a fan of the novel The Picture of Dorian Gray, I loved how the novel used elements of the classic tale to create a painting that seems to grant your heart’s deepest desires but at a deadly cost.
Out There Screaming: An Anthology of New Black Horror
A cop begins seeing huge, blinking eyes where the headlights of cars should be that tell him who to pull over. Two freedom riders take a bus ride that leaves them stranded on a lonely road in Alabama where several unsettling somethings await them. A young girl dives into the depths of the Earth in search of the demon that killed her parents. These are just a few of the worlds of Out There Screaming, Jordan Peele’s anthology of all-new horror stories by Black writers. Featuring an introduction by Peele and an all-star roster of beloved writers and new voices, Out There Screaming is a master class in horror, and—like his spine-chilling films—its stories prey on everything we think we know about our world . . . and redefine what it means to be afraid.
A few stories were duds but majority of them were excellent and engaging reads. From tales of demonic blues player from Georgia to alien abductions, this collection offers a variety of types of stories from the weird sci-fi to downright horror, the collection varies in the intensity of terror and pulls from history, conspiracy theories, folktales, and more. No two tales are the same and each one offers something different. Many stories open up a larger discussion about race relations, the Civil Rights Movement, and ancestry just to name a few.
Do you have any “Spooktastic Reads” you’ll be reading for Halloween? Do you have any recommendations to share? Comment below!
