Happy Halloween!
Recommended Reading for Children
Juvenile Fiction
The Legend of Sleepy Hollow by Washington Irving
While you may have heard of Ichabod Crane, Katrina Van Tassel, and the Headless Horseman, you’ve never SEEN them quite like this — through the macabre imagination of the inimitable Gris Grimly.
Juvenile Non-Fiction
Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark by Alvin Schwartz
Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark contains some of the most alarming tales of horror, dark revenge, and supernatural events of all time. Walking corpses, dancing bones, knife-wielding madmen, and narrow escapes from death–they’re all here in this chilling collection of ghost stories. Make sure you read these books with the light ON!
Juvenile Non-Fiction
Haunted Houses Around the World by Joan Axelrod-Contrada
Visit some of the spookiest houses around the world. Prepare to be scared as you visit haunted mansions and ghostly residence.
Recommended Reading for Young Adults
Young Adult Fiction
The Weight of Blood by Tiffany D. Jackson
An outcast at her small-town Georgia high school, Madison Washington has always been a teasing target for bullies. And she’s dealt with it because she has more pressing problems to manage. Until the morning a surprise rainstorm reveals her most closely kept secret: Maddy is biracial. She has been passing for white her entire life at the behest of her fanatical white father, Thomas Washington.
After a viral bullying video pulls back the curtain on Springvile High’s racist roots, student leaders come up with a plan to change their image: host the school’s first integrated prom as a show of unity. The popular white class president convinces her Black superstar quarterback boyfriend to ask Maddy to be his date, leaving Maddy wondering if it’s possible to have a normal life.
But some of her classmates aren’t done with her just yet. And what they don’t know is that Maddy still has another secret… one that will cost them all their lives.
Recommended Reading for Adults
Non-Fiction
Ghostland: An American History in Haunted Places by Colin Dickey
Colin Dickey is on the trail of America’s ghosts. Crammed into old houses and hotels, abandoned prisons and empty hospitals, the spirits that linger continue to capture our collective imagination, but why? His own fascination piqued by a house hunt in Los Angeles that revealed derelict foreclosures and “zombie homes,” Dickey embarks on a journey across the continental United States to decode and unpack the American history repressed in our most famous haunted places. Some have established reputations as “the most haunted mansion in America,” or “the most haunted prison”; others, like the haunted Indian burial grounds in West Virginia, evoke memories from the past our collective nation tries to forget.
Non-Fiction
Witchcraft: A History in Thirteen Trials by Marion Gibson
Travel through thirteen witch trials across history, some famous–like the Salem witch trials–and some lesser-known: on Vardø island, Norway, in the 1620s, where an indigenous Sami woman was accused of murder; in France in 1731, during the country’s last witch trial, where a young woman was pitted against her confessor and cult leader; in Lesotho in 1948, where British colonial authorities executed local leaders. Exploring how witchcraft was feared, then decriminalized, and then reimagined as gendered persecution, Witchcraft takes on the intersections between gender and power, indigenous spirituality and colonial rule, political conspiracy and individual resistance.
Non-Fiction
The Super Natural: A New Vision of the Unexplained by Whitley Strieber and Jeffrey J. Kripal
Rather than merely document the anomalous, these authors-one the man who popularized alien abduction and the other a renowned scholar and ‘renegade advocate for including the paranormal in religious studies’ (The New York Times)-deliver a fast-paced and exhilarating study of why the supernatural is neither fantasy nor fiction but a vital and authentic aspect of life. Their suggestion? That all kinds of ‘impossible’ things, from extra-dimensional beings to bilocation to bumps in the night, are not impossible at all- rather, they are a part of our natural world. But this natural world is immeasurably more weird, more wonderful, and probably more populated than we have so far imagined with our current categories and cultures, which are what really make these things seem ‘impossible.’