Scary Stories for October

If you see something you like, all these spooky stories are in stock so come grab your favorite. If you have something else in mind, remember that all special orders get 10% off. Read on!

Board Books & Children's Stories:

​Learn all about your new body with this spooky, and sweet, anatomy primer.

​With interactive pages and beautiful black-and-white illustrations this little book is perfect for baby's first Halloween.

​An excellent book for emergent readers, Adam Rex's Are You Scared, Darth Vader? is a hilarious adventure to share together. 

​From "Mary, Mary, Tall and Scary" to "Wee Willie Werewolf," this collection of classic nursery rhymes turned on their heads will give readers the chills--and a serious case of belly laughs. With clever rhyme and spooky illustrations, Mother Ghost is perfect for getting in the Halloween spirit. Boo!

A jaunty rhyme takes readers on an underwater scavenger hunt as a comical skeleton tries to put itself back together piece by piece. Make no bones about it: this rollicking read-aloud will have young ones learning anatomy without even realizing it.

​Middle Grade Fiction:

​When middle schooler Kelly Ferguson’s Halloween plans switch from party-going to babysitting, she thinks the scariest part of her night will be the death of her social life. But then Baby Jacob gets kidnapped by the Boogeyman’s minions and Kelly learns there’s a whole lot more to childcare than free snacks and Netflix. ​

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After suffering a tragic loss, eleven-year-old Ollie who only finds solace in books discovers a chilling ghost story about a girl named Beth, the two brothers who loved her, and a peculiar deal made with “the smiling man." Captivated by the tale, Ollie begins to wonder if the smiling man might be real when she stumbles upon the graves of the very people she’s been reading about on a school trip to a nearby farm. 

A creepy, spellbinding ghost story destined to become a classic.

​Ever since Cassidy Blake almost drowned (okay, she did drown, but she doesn’t like to think about it), she can pull back the Veil that separates the living from the dead . . . and enter the world of spirits. Her best friend is even a ghost. So things are already pretty strange. But they’re about to get much stranger. When Cass meets a girl who shares her “gift,” she realizes how much she still has to learn about the Veil — and herself. And she’ll have to learn fast. The city of ghosts is more dangerous than she ever imagined.

​First in a collection of three books, Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark draws heavily from folklore and urban legends to create truly hair-raising short horror stories for children. Read at your own risk!

​Young Adult:

​There are no monsters anymore, or so the children in the city of Lucille are taught. Jam and her best friend, Redemption, have grown up with this lesson all their life. But when Jam meets Pet, she must fight not only to protect her best friend, but also to uncover the truth, and ask the difficult questions about what choices you can make when the society around you is in denial.

​When Tea accidentally resurrects her brother from the dead, she learns she is different from the other witches in her family - she's a bone witch, a title that makes her feared and ostracized by her community. But as Tea puts all her energy into becoming an asha―one who can wield elemental magic, dark forces are approaching quickly, and in the face of danger, Tea will have to overcome her obstacles...and make a powerful choice.

It's been eighteen months since the Raxter School for Girls was put under quarantine. Since the Tox hit and pulled Hetty's life out from under her. Now, cut off from the rest of the world and left to fend for themselves on their island home, the girls don't dare wander outside the school's fence, where the Tox has made the woods wild and dangerous. But when Byatt goes missing, Hetty will do anything to find her, even if it means breaking quarantine and braving the horrors that lie beyond the fence. 

​Edgar Allan Poe is ready to go to college to escape his overbearing foster father, who believes poetry is a waste of time. Although Poe admires Byron and love poems, he secretly yearns to tell tales of death and darkness. While he is daydreaming in church about 72 people who died in a theater fire, his Muse manifests into a raven-haired girl. Muses of art are frowned upon because they lead to debauchery, and Edgar tries hard to abandon his Muse, Lenore, but it becomes too late as the town and his father have encountered her. Hoping to escape Lenore at the University of Virginia, Poe finds himself in deeper trouble as he is penniless and cannot afford to pay his college debts. 

​Nonfiction reads:

​North Carolina is considered one of the US headquarters for ghost lights—that is, for spooky and unexplained luminous phenomenon. Nearly half of all reported ghost lights shine, blink, burn, dance, or float somewhere in the state. These ghost lights are well known in their localities. There are scary and fascinating stories associated with them, and they attract many visitors, each hoping to see a ball of fire floating over a cemetery or a jack-o’-lantern illuminating a corner of the Great Dismal Swamp or a long-dead railroad man swinging his lantern in search of his severed head.

​Adult Fiction:

For more than ten years, a mysterious and violent predator committed fifty sexual assaults in Northern California before moving south, where he perpetrated ten sadistic murders. Then he disappeared, eluding capture by multiple police forces and some of the best detectives in the area. Three decades later, Michelle McNamara, was determined to find the violent psychopath she called "the Golden State Killer." I’ll Be Gone in the Dark is a portrait of a woman’s obsession and her unflagging pursuit of the truth. Utterly original and compelling, it has been hailed as a modern true crime classic—one which fulfilled Michelle's dream: helping unmask the Golden State Killer.

​The year is 1988. High school sophomores Abby and Gretchen have been best friends since fourth grade. But after an evening of skinny-dipping goes disastrously wrong, Gretchen begins to act…different. She’s moody. She’s irritable. And bizarre incidents keep happening whenever she’s nearby. Abby’s investigation leads her to some startling discoveries—and by the time their story reaches its terrifying conclusion, the fate of Abby and Gretchen will be determined by a single question: Is their friendship powerful enough to beat the devil?

​When reclusive writer Leonora is invited to the English countryside for a weekend away, she reluctantly agrees to make the trip. But as the first night falls, revelations unfold among friends old and new, an unnerving memory shatters Leonora’s reserve, and a haunting realization creeps in: the party is not alone in the woods.

​In this horror story set in colonial New England, a law-abiding Puritan woman goes missing. Or perhaps she has fled or abandoned her family. Or perhaps she's been kidnapped, and set loose to wander in the dense woods of the north. Alone and possibly lost, she meets another woman in the forest. Then everything changes. In the House in the Dark of the Woods is the story of a bewitching, a betrayal, a master huntress and her quarry. It is a story of anger, of evil, of hatred and of redemption. It is the story of a haunting, a story that makes up the bedrock of American mythology, but told in a vivid way you will never forget.

​In the north of England, far from the intrusions of cities but not far from civilization, Silvie and her family are living as if they are ancient Britons, surviving by the tools and knowledge of the Iron Age. The ancient Britons built ghost walls to ward off enemy invaders, rude barricades of stakes topped with ancestral skulls. When the group builds one of their own, they find a spiritual connection to the past. What comes next but human sacrifice? A story at once mythic and strikingly timely, Ghost Wall urges us to wonder how far we have come from the “primitive minds” of our ancestors.

​With raucous humor and brilliantly orchestrated mayhem, Meddling Kids subverts teen detective archetypes like the Hardy Boys, the Famous Five, and Scooby-Doo, and delivers an exuberant and wickedly entertaining celebration of horror, love, friendship, and many-tentacled, interdimensional demon spawn.

​Once united by their ambitions, Victor and Eli now face off from opposite sides of the law: the first is fresh out of prison, the latter is working with the police. But Eli–the “good guy”–and his partner Serena are hunting down everyone else with superpowers, and Victor and his companion Sydney are pursuing revenge instead of the greater good. Friends turned foes and sisters turned sworn enemies will plumb the depths of cruelty in their quests for retribution.

​Betrayed by those she trusts most and her magic ripped from her, all Sal the Cacophony has left is her name, her story, and the weapon she used to carve both. But she has a will stronger than magic, and knows exactly where to go. The Scar, a land torn between powerful empires, where rogue mages go to disappear, disgraced soldiers go to die and Sal went with a blade, a gun, and a list of seven names. Revenge will be its own reward.

​The Cabin at the End of the World is an unbearably tense, gripping tale of paranoia, sacrifice, apocalypse, and survival that escalates to a shattering conclusion, one in which the fate of a loving family and quite possibly all of humanity are entwined. It is a masterpiece of terror and suspense from the fantastically fertile imagination of Paul Tremblay.