The Horror and Sci-Fi Books I'm Actually Reading This Spooky Season

Every year around this time I do the same thing. I tell myself I'm going to read something light and comforting, and then by the second week of September I'm three chapters into something with a house that doesn't want visitors. I don't know why I fight it. The films are the main event on this site, obviously, but the books are where the actual sleepless nights come from, so I thought I'd tell you what's currently on my nightstand, wedged between a cold mug of tea and whichever jumper I've decided is my reading jumper.

None of these are new. I'm not the person to ask about what came out last week. I'm the person who's still catching up on things from decades ago because somebody mentioned them once and it took me two years to get round to it.

The old ghost stories that started it all

I keep coming back to the classic English ghost story writers, the ones who work in that quiet, unhurried way where nothing happens for pages and then something happens that you can't quite explain even after you've read it twice. There's a particular kind of horror in a story that never shows you the thing properly. You get a shape at the end of a corridor, a sound in a room you know is empty, and your own brain does the rest. I picked up classic ghost stories anthology hardback and read most of it by lamp light, which I do not recommend if you have any plans to sleep afterwards.

What gets me about these older stories is how little they need. No gore, no big reveal, just a very ordinary person noticing that something is slightly wrong, and the story trusting you to sit with that. It's the difference between a jump scare and a feeling that follows you round the flat for the rest of the evening.

A haunted house done properly

Shirley Jackson's The Haunting of Hill House is one I reread most years, and it still gets me every single time, which annoys me a bit if I'm honest. It's less about the house doing anything dramatic and more about a person slowly coming apart while everyone around her insists she's fine. That's a much scarier idea to me than a ghost with a grudge. If you've only seen an adaptation and never read the actual book, do yourself a favour. The prose does something the screen can't quite manage.

I also went back to We Have Always Lived in the Castle, which isn't strictly horror in the traditional sense, but it has the same unsettled feeling running under it the whole way through. Cosy horror doesn't always mean ghosts. Sometimes it just means a story that makes your own living room feel slightly less safe than it did an hour ago.

Where sci-fi and horror start sharing a shelf

This is the bit of the pile I didn't expect to enjoy as much as I did. Jeff VanderMeer's Annihilation sits right in that overlap between science fiction and horror, where the fear doesn't come from a monster you can name but from something that's changed the rules of the world and won't explain itself. I read it in two sittings and then spent a good while just staring at my own garden, which tells you something.

If you want a whole reading pile in one go rather than hunting titles down one at a time, horror and sci-fi book box set or bundle is a decent way to build up a shelf without the decision fatigue. I am, admittedly, a person who owns several unread books purely because the covers were doing something interesting, so take my restraint advice with a pinch of salt.

What I'm picking up next

My rule for spooky season is one classic, one modern, one that technically isn't horror but reads like it is anyway. I've got a stack building up by the sofa that's started to look less like a reading list and more like a small structural hazard. If you've got something you think belongs on it, I read the comments, and I do actually take recommendations seriously, mostly because I've run out of my own ideas by the time October properly arrives.

For now, kettle on, lamp on, phone away. That's the whole method.

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