It’s spooky season, so it’s the perfect time to pick up a scary story to read as the nights grow longer and colder. I know you love Stephen King, but if you’re looking for something different, might I suggest one of these books from our collection?
House of Hunger by Alexis Henderson. E-book, downloadable audiobook. Marion Shaw has been raised in the slums, where want and deprivation is all she knows. Despite longing to leave the city and its miseries, she has no real hope of escape until the day she spots a peculiar listing in the newspaper seeking a bloodmaid. In a matter of days, she finds herself the newest bloodmaid at the notorious House of Hunger. There, Marion is swept into a world of dark debauchery-and at the center of it all is her. But when her fellow bloodmaids begin to go missing in the night, Marion is thrust into a vicious game of cat and mouse. She’ll need to learn the rules of her new home-and fast-or its halls will soon become her grave.
The Hunger by Alma Katsu. E-book, downloadable audiobook. Evil is invisible, and it is everywhere. That is the only way to explain the series of misfortunes that have plagued the wagon train known as the Donner Party. They cannot seem to escape tragedy…or the feelings that someone–or something–is stalking them. Whether it’s a curse from the beautiful Tamsen Donner (who some think might be a witch), their ill-advised choice of route through uncharted terrain, or just plain bad luck, the ninety men, women, and children of the Donner Party are heading into one of one of the deadliest and most disastrous Western adventures in American history. As members of the group begin to disappear, the survivors start to wonder if there really is something disturbing, and hungry, waiting for them in the mountains…and whether the evil that has unfolded around them may have in fact been growing within them all along.
Lone Women by Victor LaValle. E-book, downloadable audiobook. Adelaide Henry carries an enormous steamer trunk with her wherever she goes. It’s locked at all times. Because when the trunk is opened, people around her start to disappear… The year is 1914, and Adelaide is in trouble. Her secret sin killed her parents, and forced her to flee her hometown of Redondo, California, in a hellfire rush, ready to make her way to Montana as a homesteader. Dragging the trunk with her at every stop, she will be one of the “lone women” taking advantage of the government’s offer of free land for those who can cultivate it-except that Adelaide isn’t alone. And the secret she’s tried so desperately to lock away might be the only thing keeping her alive.
The Only Good Indians by Stephen Graham Jones. E-book, downloadable audiobook, large print. Four American Indian men from the Blackfeet Nation, who were childhood friends, find themselves in a desperate struggle for their lives, against an entity that wants to exact revenge upon them for what they did during an elk hunt ten years earlier by killing them, their families, and friends.
Plain Bad Heroines by Emily Danforth. E-book, downloadable audiobook. 1902, the Brookhants School for Girls. Flo and Clara are obsessed with each other and with Mary MacLane, the author of a scandalous bestselling memoir. Their bodies are discovered in a nearby apple orchard, with a copy of Mary’s book splayed beside them, the victims of a swarm of stinging, angry yellow jackets. Within five years three more people die on the property– and the Brookhants School for Girls closes its doors forever. The now abandoned and crumbling Brookhants is back in the news when writer Merritt Emmons publishes a breakout book celebrating the queer, feminist history surrounding the “haunted and cursed” Gilded Age institution. Her book inspires a controversial horror film adaptation starring lesbian ‘It’ girl Harper Harper playing the ill-fated heroine Flo, and former child star Audrey Wells as Clara. But as Brookhants opens its gates once again for filming, soon it’s impossible to tell where the curse leaves off and Hollywood begins.
The Reformatory by Tananarive Due. E-book, downloadable audiobook. A gripping, page-turning novel set in Jim Crow Florida that follows Robert Stephens Jr. as he’s sent to a segregated reform school that is a chamber of terrors where he sees the horrors of racism and injustice, for the living, and the dead.
Sorrowland by Rivers Solomon. Downloadable audiobook. Vern gives birth to twins and raises them away from the influence of the outside world. But something is wrong – not with them, but with her own body… A genre-bending work of Gothic fiction that wrestles with the history of American racism.
Tell Me I’m Worthless by Alison Rumfit. E-book, downloadable audiobook. Three years ago, Alice spent one night in an abandoned house with her friends, Ila and Hannah. Since then, Alice’s life has spiraled. She lives a haunted existence, selling videos of herself for money, going to parties she hates, drinking herself to sleep. Memories of that night torment Alice, but when Ila asks her to return to the House, to go past the KEEP OUT sign and over the sick earth where teenagers dare each other to venture, Alice knows she must go. Together, Alice and Ila must face the horrors that happened there, must pull themselves apart from the inside out, put their differences aside, and try to rescue Hannah, whom the House has chosen to make its own.
What Moves the Dead by T. Kingfisher. E-book, downloadable audiobook. When Alex Easton, a retired soldier, receives word that their childhood friend Madeline Usher is dying, they race to the ancestral home of the Ushers in the remote countryside of Ruritania. What they find there is a nightmare of fungal growths and possessed wildlife, surrounding a dark, pulsing lake. Madeline sleepwalks and speaks in strange voices at night, and her brother Roderick is consumed with a mysterious malady of the nerves. Aided by a redoubtable British mycologist and a baffled American doctor, Alex must unravel the secret of the House of Usher before it consumes them all.
