Magic Word Recommended: Spooky Books

评语：NCIS agent Shannon Moss is a member of a select unit that ventures into deep space (which we then understand is also a way to travel into deep time) to gather information about crimes in the present. One night she gets a call to a double homicide. A wife and her son are brutally murdered while the husband and daughter are nowhere to be found. The husband turns out to be a member of the same select group that Moss is. He was a pilot in Mission Zodiac that sent twelve ships into deep space. As Agent Moss’s investigation has more and more puzzling developments, the closer the world is drawn to The Terminus, the end of everything as we know it. If you finished the Netflix original DARK and are craving something similar, look no further. –Danni

评语：This book is a trip (literally and figuratively). The basic premise: a young woman and her new boyfriend take a road trip to visit the boyfriend's parents for the first time. However, there is so much going on here, from the strange dialogue between characters and subtly off-putting signs that something is not quite right. At the risk of sounding clique, nothing is as it seems. (dun-DUN!) The back of the book states, "You will be scared. But you won't know why..." and I can't think of a more accurate way to explain this novel. –Lindsay

评语：Miranda Silver hears voices -- her mother, grandmother, great-grandmother. Her house speaks to her, leans into her, keeps her close & safe. Will do anything to keep her close & safe. This is a gorgeously written, thrilling gothic horror novel about the tangled webs of family legacy & deeply rooted white nationalism. When you finish it: take ten minutes to sit with it, and then read the first chapter again. I swear your life will be forever changed. –Abby

评语：Not a creepy read, but definitely October/Halloween worthy. The Witches of NewYork takes place in 1880's Manhattan and follows three women: two seasoned witches who own a tea shop which caters to the needs of women all across the city, and a young woman with special gifts who is looking to break free from her rural farm life and ends up employed at this tea shop. In this novel we get a more nuanced look at life as a female witch and get to experience all the magic and danger that comes with this. –Lindsay

评语：Daphne is the OG Gothic Queen. It’s a tradition of mine to read at least one of her novels each autumn-spooky season. Rebecca has been selling off the shelves because the new Netflix movie comes out on October 21st! I’m also a big fan of Rebecca but I wouldn’t want Jamaica Inn to fall under the radar. This book is one of her best because she creates an atmosphere like no other - the English countryside with the moors, the bogs, the tors all come alive. You will feel the inn’s dark, brooding power. –Jacque

评语：BIRD BOX #2! Need I say more? Malorie takes place 10 years after the events of the first book. Truly, it’s action-packed suspense with a blend of slow-burn mystery. It’s the sequel we didn’t know we needed! –Jacque

评语：While these two books are categorized as Young Adult, both will still give an adult reader the chills. Kurtagich's vivid descriptions have a way of crawling under your skin and burrowing deeper and deeper as you keep reading. While the two books have different basic plots–The Dead House taking place in a boarding school setting and And the Trees Crept In revolving around a rural country home--both will make you question which characters you can trust, and whether or not you can even trust your own mind. –Lindsay

评语：The best description I can give of this new release is portal horror. Kara is newly divorced and in need of a place to stay. She moves back in with her mom, whom she finds insufferable, but then her uncle offers her a job at and the apartment above his museum of oddities--taxidermy animals, odd drawings, and the like. While locking up one night, she discovers a hole in the wall. Needing help to patch it up, she enlists the help of a barista named Steve who works next door. Unlike a normal hole, there is no view of sheet rock but instead a corridor of doors that lead to a place of unimaginable fright. I was THOROUGHLY scared while reading this, which is not easy to do.

评语：Reading this is like watching a Blackfeet Jordan Peele movie. I don’t normally read horror, but this book possesses all the alluring elements of a classic revenge thriller while exploring some of the themes you might expect in a literary fiction novel, such as cultural identity, family, and tradition. It’s been described as Paul Tremblay meets Tommy Orange, and I couldn’t agree more, it combines all the grit and gore of the former with the propulsive, character-driven suspense of the latter. A dark and surprisingly funny page-turner. –Serena

评语：There are some books that you can just feel. That bore deep under your organs and kind of wiggle around, never quite settling. Everything Under is one of those books for me. It's eerie and grimy with a sharp tongue. It's about secrets, and family, and confronting the hurt we have caused, and loving those who have hurt us. There is an ominous river monster, and Greek-level tragedy, and lots of people running away from what they might become. In short: a perfectly haunting book for those that don't usually do traditionally scary stories. –Colleen

评语：I love how this novel takes the classic tropes of gothic literature--crumbling castles, isolation, foreign locations--and plays around with them to create an eerie and unsettling atmosphere. And as if this isn't enough, The Keep has an extremely meta personality, with a story within a story and a strong awareness of itself as a work of fiction. I've read this book a few times now and there are so many interesting layers that I always discover something new on each reread. –Lindsay

评语：Scoutmaster Tim Riggs is taking his troop on the annual trip into the Canadian wilderness. What was supposed to be a routine bonding experience turns into a weekend of trauma and death when a stranger stumbles into their campsite. Riggs, whose day job is a medical doctor, assumes the young man is ill and in need of assistance. This is the first decision that leads to the boys quivering in fear of an entity that has no discernible goal, but to devour. This book is a wild, disgusting ride. I had a good time, and the last scene made my heart break. –Danni

评语：I am experiencing a dislocation of reality. This line appears on the very first page of The Third Hotel and has lingered in the back of my mind since I read it last year at Danni's recommendation. Clare, recently widowed, is attending a horror film festival in her deceased husband's stead, but when she lands in Havana there he is: her husband Richard, hale and whole. Terribly confused, Clare follows her dead husband over the following days, and the edges of reality become so blurred that they may as well have not existed in the first place. It's not a ghost story, exactly; it's not horror, it's not a psychological thriller, there is no Shocking Twist that brings the facts to light. It is a story about a woman grieving in a city where she does not belong. It's not a ghost story, but this book has haunted me, as it will haunt you. –Abby

评语：I grew up in a house full of scary stuff. Macabre bric a brac on the shelves, Hitchcock movies in the VCR, and, of course, endless rows of books, many of which tended toward the dark and spooky in one way or another. We weren’t Halloween people--that was for amateurs! No, we were always a little bit scary, and that scariness mostly came from the room at the top of my parents’ house, my father’s office. My dad, Peter Straub, has written more than 20 books. They are often shelved in the Horror section, sometimes in the Thriller section, sometimes in Fantasy, and sometimes, like in our store, in the regular old Fiction section. His books are wild and smart and have very long sentences, and if you think you know exactly what kind of writer he is based on what his books jackets look like, you’re probably wrong. Right now, I’m rereading one of my dad’s books, The Talisman, which he wrote with Stephen King in the early 1980s, when I was a very small child. I hadn’t read it since I was a tween, and it is such a welcome feeling, revisiting characters I knew so long ago, written by previous incarnations of my dad and Steve, thinking about the two of them as writers in my current stage of life; parents of tiny humans, ambitious, and ready to create new worlds. The book is full of peril and adventure. Is it ‘spooky’? Maybe not. But there is real fear in it, and danger, and mysterious forces, and love. It’s also 800 pages long, and so it might be fat enough to tide you over until after the election. –Emma