Horror - Part Six (The Final) - Ten Books I Might Read in October

Tomorrow is October 1st, Hallowe'en month, Horror month... yada yada. This will be my last post on the subject. I'll highlight ten books that I might consider reading in October. All very short so maybe I'll get most of them.

Ten Books I'll Try to Read in October.

1. John Wyndham - Tales of Gooseflesh and Laughter.

"In this volume, the first collection of John Wyndham's short stories to be published in America, there is a running thread of humor which appears in almost all the stories - sometimes subtle, sometimes erupting into hilarious farce. But the book is much more than a matter of mirth, Mr. Wyhndham has a neat hand for unexpected chills, and brings to his short stories all the skill for which his novels are well known."

"An original collection of short stories. Chinese Puzzle, Una, The Wheel, Jizzle, Heaven Scent, Compassion Circuit, More Spinned Against, A Present From Brunswick, Confidence Trick, Opposite Number, Wild Flower."

2. Max Brooks - The Extinction Parade, Volume #1 (2014).

"Max Brooks, the best selling Zombie writer in history, unleashes an all-new horror epic! As humans wage their losing fight versus the hordes of the subdead, a frightening realization sets in with the secretive vampire race: our food is dying off. This is the story of the vampire's descent into all-out war with the mindless, hungry hordes of the zombie outbreak as humanity tries to survive them all! This collected edition contains the entire first chapter of Extinction Parade (Issues #1-5) and a massive undead cover gallery!"

3. Ness Brown - The Scourge Between the Stars (2023).

"Ness Brown's The Scourge Between Stars is a tense, claustrophobic sci-fi/horror blend set aboard a doomed generation ship harboring something terrible within its walls.

As acting captain of the starship Calypso, Jacklyn Albright is responsible for keeping the last of humanity alive as they limp back to Earth from their forebears’ failed colony on a distant planet.

Faced with constant threats of starvation and destruction in the treacherous minefield of interstellar space, Jacklyn's crew has reached their breaking point. As unrest begins to spread throughout the ship’s Wards, a new threat emerges, picking off crew members in grim, bloody fashion.

Jacklyn and her team must hunt down the ship’s unknown intruder if they have any hope of making it back to their solar system alive."

4. Mary Shelley - Frankenstein (1818).

"Mary Shelley's seminal novel of the scientist whose creation becomes a monster.

This edition is the original 1818 text, which preserves the hard-hitting and politically charged aspects of Shelley's original writing, as well as her unflinching wit and strong female voice. "

5. Catherine McCarthy - The House at the End of Lacelean Street (2024).

"It's midnight and in the midst of an ice storm when Claudia Dance boards the bright yellow bus to Lacelean Street, a destination she has never heard of. She has no coat, no luggage, and no clue as to why she left home. In fact, she has no memory of her past whatsoever, and yet she feels compelled to make the trip. She will come to realize that salvation lies within the red-brick house at the end of Lacelean Street, a salvation granted by the strange power that dwells within. Sanity will be questioned, limits tested, and answers revealed... But at what price?"

6. Ira Levin - The Stepford Wives (1972).

"For Joanna, her husband, Walter, and their children, the move to beautiful Stepford seems almost too good to be true. It is. For behind the town's idyllic facade lies a terrible secret--a secret so shattering that no one who encounters it will ever be the same.

At once a masterpiece of psychological suspense and a savage commentary on a media-driven society that values the pursuit of youth and beauty at all costs, The Stepford Wives is a novel so frightening in its final implications that the title itself has earned a place in the American lexicon."

7. Keith Roberts - The Furies (1966).

"The rule of the wasps. It all started with a nuclear test that went wrong. The test cracked the bed of the sea, raised a volcano the height of Vesuvius where before there had been a five-mile Deep...

Then the Furies struck - monstrous and deadly wasps nearly the size of man.
Their nests sprang up all over the world. They descended and slaughtered humanity at will. Breeding in their nests by the billions, they began enslaving the earth..."

8. Shirley Jackson - Dark Tales (2016).

"Step into the unsettling world of Shirley Jackson this autumn with a collection of her finest, darkest short stories, revealing the queen of American gothic at her mesmerizing best.

There's something nasty in suburbia. In these deliciously dark tales, the daily commute turns into a nightmarish game of hide and seek, the loving wife hides homicidal thoughts and the concerned citizen might just be an infamous serial killer. In the haunting world of Shirley Jackson, nothing is as it seems and nowhere is safe, from the city streets to the country manor, and from the small-town apartment to the dark, dark woods...

Includes the following stories: 'The Possibility of Evil'; 'Louisa, Please Come Home'; 'Paranoia'; 'The Honeymoon of Mrs Smith'; 'The Story We Used to Tell'; 'The Sorcerer's Apprentice'; 'Jack the Ripper'; 'The Beautiful Stranger'; 'All She Said Was Yes'; 'What a Thought'; 'The Bus'; 'Family Treasures'; 'A Visit'; 'The Good Wife'; 'The Man in the Woods'; 'Home'; 'The Summer People'."

9. Caitlin R. Kiernan - Black Helicopters (Tinfoil Dossier #2 / 2015).

"A dark jewel of a novella, this definitive edition of Caitlin R. Kiernan’s Black Helicopters is the expanded and completed version of the World Fantasy Award-nominated original.

Just as the Signalman stood and faced the void in Agents of Dreamland, so it falls to Ptolema, a chess piece in her agency’s world-spanning game, to unravel what has become tangled and unknowable.

Something strange is happening on the shores of New England. Something stranger still is happening to the world itself, chaos unleashed, rational explanation slipped loose from the moorings of the known. Two rival agencies stare across the Void at one another. Two sisters, the deadly, sickened products of experiments going back decades, desperately evade their hunters.

An invisible war rages at the fringes of our world, with unimaginable consequences and Lovecraftian horrors that ripple centuries into the future."

10. Waubgeshig Rice - Moon of the Crusted Snow (Moon #1 / 2018).

"A daring post-apocalyptic thriller from a powerful rising literary voice.

With winter looming, a small northern Anishinaabe community goes dark. Cut off, people become passive and confused. Panic builds as the food supply dwindles. While the band council and a pocket of community members struggle to maintain order, an unexpected visitor arrives, escaping the crumbling society to the south. Soon after, others follow.

The community leadership loses its grip on power as the visitors manipulate the tired and hungry to take control of the reserve. Tensions rise and, as the months pass, so does the death toll due to sickness and despair. Frustrated by the building chaos, a group of young friends and their families turn to the land and Anishinaabe tradition in hopes of helping their community thrive again. Guided through the chaos by an unlikely leader named Evan Whitesky, they endeavor to restore order while grappling with a grave decision."

There you go, some horror reading ideas for you if you want a quickie. Enjoy October!