Booklist: October Boo-oo-ks!
This October we intend to feature some chills, thrills, and things that go bump in the night. Before we get there, though, we wanted to remind you of some of the Halloweenish books we have previously reviewed on our site.
J.D. Barker writes both horror and thrillers that have a horror undercurrent, and we have so far reviewed three of his books on our site. Forsaken is definitely a witches and evil spellbinding story, well crafted and quite chilling. The Fourth Monkey and The Fifth to Die are police thrillers, but fit well into our Halloween theme of books that give you goosebumps. Later this month we plan to publish reviews on his two more recent books: Dracul (cowritten with Dacre Stoker) and The Sixth Wicked Child.
Whether writing as herself or as Mira Grant, Seanan McGuire walks the line between fantasy, science fiction, and horror. We did not review her Mira Grant series Newsflesh or Parasitology, since we read them some years prior to beginning this blog, but they are extremely well written and guaranteed to give you chills. We did review Into the Drowning Deep, and found it to be both wonderful and frightful. And her (Seanan McGuire) October Daye series might have been made to binge read during the month of October. We recently reviewed Night and Silence, and this month plan to review the most recent of the series, The Unkindest Tide. For a different kind of ghost story, check out her books Sparrow Hill Road and The Girl in the Green Silk Gown. We also plan to review her standalone novel Middlegame, which features the worst kind of monsters imaginable: humans.
Victor LaValle’s The Changeling is another fantasy that walks the line between that genre and horror. LaValle’s horror creeps up on you, building throughout the novel until by the end you are gripping the book tightly.
For some real-life fright, Peter Brannen’s The Ends of the World tells about the five mass extinctions that almost ended life on earth–and asks whether we might be in the midst of a sixth one. And although it’s not frightening, Rise of the Necrofauna does explore bringing animals back from the dead…or at least from extinction.
We hope your October is not too frightening. That is, unless you are deliberately seeking out your frights in the pages of a book.