Eerie Reads
One October, I recommended some eerie books––one per day, in the hope of getting everyone in a heebie-jeebie frame of mind, and distract us from the dire news cycle. Here is the complete list, plus a few bonus suggestions (because, you know, too many books and not enough days of the month…).
Rizzio by Denis Mina
The Heart of a Dog by Mikhail Bulgakov
Every Day is Mother’s Day and Vacant Possession by Hillary Mantel
Grimoire: New Scottish Folk Tales by Robin Robertson
We Have Always Lived in the Castle by Shirley Jackson
The Wasp Factory by Iain Banks
Alias Grace by Margaret Atwood
The Daylight Gate by Jeanette Winterson
The Butcher Boy by Patrick McGrath
Ghost Wall by Sarah Moss
The Turn of the Screw by Henry James
The Little Stranger by Sarah Waters
Eva Moves the Furniture by Margot Livesey
The Devil in the White City by Eric Larson
Cracks by Sheila Kohler
The Name of the Rose by Umberto Echo
‘Salem’s Lot by Stephen King
The Testament of Gideon Mack by James Robertson
Perfume: The Story of a Murderer by Patrick Süskind
The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde by Robert Louis Stephenson
Felicia’s Journey by William Trevor
The Woman in Black by Susan Hill
The Fall of the House of Usher by Edgar Allen Poe
Lord of the Flies by William Golding
Dreaming Frankenstein and Collected Poems by Liz Lochhead
Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier
Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro
The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories by Angela Carter
Frankenstein by Mary Shelley
The Ghost Stories of Edith Wharton by Edith Wharton
Dracula by Bram Stoker
And some bonus suggestions, in no particular order: The Goth Girl books by Chris Riddell, His Bloody Project by Graham Macrae Burnett, Beloved by Toni Morrison, The Road by Cormac McCarthy, And Then There Were None, by Agatha Christie, The Portrait of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde, The Woman in White by Wilkie Collins, The Casebook of Victor Frankenstein by Peter Ackroyd, An Awfully Big Adventure by Beryl Bainbridge, The Collector by John Fowles, The End of Alice by A. M. Holmes, The Hound of the Baskervilles by Arthur Conan Doyle, The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher by Kate Summerscale, A Judgement in Stone by Ruth Rendell, The Cement Garden by Ian McEwan, The Picnic at Hanging Rock by Joan Lindsay, The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson, Everything Under by Daisy Johnson, Swimming Home by Deborah Levy, The Ballad of Peckham Rye by Muriel Spark, The People’s Act of Love by James Meek.
