cracks knuckles How long you got?

I'm a seasonal reader as well, especially in autumn/winter. I started a thread the other day on horror recs so that may have some options for you too!

• Something Wicked This Way Comes, The October Country, and The Halloween Tree all by Ray Bradbury (warning for purple prose and good ol' boy misogyny, but beyond that the atmosphere in his novels is fantastic)

• Hex by Thomas Olde Heuvelt (atmosphere-heavy)

• The Secret History by Donna Tartt (if you're not already familiar, the blueprint of the various 'academia' styles you see around today)

• Into the Drowning Deep by Mira Grant (ocean horror)

• Dublin Murder Squad series by Tana French (technically anytime of year, but it's crime fiction and I loooove this series so I'm throwing it in anyway!)

• The Fisherman by John Langan (literary horror, themes regarding how we tell stories)

• The Silent Companions by Laura Purcell (historical horror, really creepy, I love this one!)

• Small Spaces series by Katherine Arden (Middle grade or young YA if you want something nostalgic)

• Saturday Night Ghost Club by Craig Davidson (one of my favorite books, male coming of age story, I found it incredibly emotionally affecting, he also writes way more graphic horror under pen name Nick Cutter)

• The Familiars by Stacey Hall (technically not horror but it's about the Pendle Hill Witch Trials, so thematically relevant)

• Mexican Gothic by Silvia Moreno-Garcia (slow burn Mexican horror, gets gnarly at the end)

• Shutter Island by Dennis Lehane (I love the movie adaptation and the book is great as well)

• Old Country by Matt & Harrison Query (if you like nosleep/creepypastas and can handle deeply annoying redpilled gender role bullshit, the actual horror happening can get quite unnerving)

• Dead Water by C.A. Fletcher (isolated small island Something's In The Water horror)

• Pretty much anything by Lisa Morton. She writes both fiction and nonfiction. I've read Trick or Treat: A History of Halloween and Calling the Spirits: A History of Seances and loved both

• The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson (no parenthetical comment needed)

• The September House by Carissa Orlando (haunted house story with a focus on mother-daughter relationship, also surprisingly funny!)

• While They Wait & The Chill by Scott Carson (he's heavy on folklore in his writing which I really enjoy)

• Chasing the Boogeyman series by Richard Chizmar (if you like true crime and can handle some seriously self important "likes the smell of his own farts" type and cringeworthy name dropping-- he's friends with Stephen King in case you didn't know ;))

• Near the Bone by Christina Henry (mountain survival horror, serious assault & misogyny in this one)

• Red Rabbit by Alex Grecian (horror western which I really enjoyed-- kept me on my toes the whole time)

• If you haven't already heard it a million times, House of Leaves is incredible and very spooky

Phew. Okay, I think that covers it!

If you have any questions about any of these let me know :)

Happy reading!

I just finished Anna Biller's novel Bluebeard's Castle. She does have a very specific style- retro, referential, deliberately artificial - but if you liked her film The Love Witch you will instantly get it. Like that film this book is a deeply feminist text about the relationships between men and women and the disparity of what we want from one another, wrapped up in feminine-coded imagery (in this case gothic novels and fairy tales). I loved it so much, I think Anna is a genius.

Honestly it's the first Harry Potter book for me.

The Night Circus is also very good.

The Castle of Otranto, Possession by AS Byatt. I posted a list of gothic novels to a post yesterday asking for horror recs. You can probably fine more contemporary titles there.

The second Cormoran Strike book (Robert Galbraith/JKR), the Silkworm is an autumn book & you don't have to have read the first one.

One of my favorite YA is The Perilous Gard by Elizabeth Marie Pope. Climax is All Hallow's Eve. Another is House with a Clock in its Walls by John Bellairs.

Not horror, because I don’t do that, but a really good book I read recently is The Gospel of Wellness: Gyms, Gurus, Goop and the False Promise of Self-Care. It focuses exclusively on women and the impact of all sorts of “wellness” trends on us. Very well written. A book to avoid like a disease is the novel Rainbow Black. It bills itself as a story about a Lesbian, but before you know it, it switches into a trans story with the WLW ending up partnering with a TIM. Just gross.

I recommend Shutter by Ramona Emerson, a crime/horror novel about a crime-scene photographer in Albuquerque. The beginning is gory, but after that it’s suspenseful but not lose-your-mind scary, more eerie and sad. I read it in autumn and it was perfect.

I read The God of Endings by Jacqueline Holland last fall and really liked it.

I second Tana French, but not just the Dublin Murder Squad books. I enjoy everything of hers.

The Sun Down Motel by Simone St. James is on my tbr list for this fall. It came highly recommended by a friend who usually has the same taste in books as I do.