The Midnight Hour Display
"Darkness falls across the land, the midnight hour is close at hand." -Rodney Lynn Temperton
It's October, so you know what that means: it's time for all things scary, haunting, and creepy. Lots of people like to watch horror, but for those of us who aren't quite brave enough for on-screen scares, reading a scary book might work...I mean, maybe...There are lots of options available in our "The Midnight Hour" display. Check out some of these seasonal titles:
"How to Sell a Haunted House" by Grady Hendrix (obviously) falls into the theme of "moving to a haunted house"--or in this case, trying to move OUT of one. "When Louise finds out her parents have died, she dreads going home. She doesn't want to leave her daughter with her ex and fly to Charleston. She doesn't want to deal with her family home, stuffed to the rafters with the remnants of her father's academic career and her mother's lifelong obsession with puppets and dolls. She doesn't want to learn how to live without the two people who knew and loved her best in the world. Most of all, she doesn't want to deal with her brother, Mark, who never left their hometown, gets fired from one job after another, and resents her success. Unfortunately, she'll need his help to get the house ready for sale because it'll take more than some new paint on the walls and clearing out a lifetime of memories to get this place on the market. But some houses don't want to be sold, and their home has other plans for both of them..." Bonus: the puppets in this book are SUPER creepy and evil! Hendrix is one of the current stars of the horror writing genre, so if haunted houses or killer puppets aren't your thing, check out one of his many other books.
Another horror MVP is Stephen Graham Jones, and his "The Only Good Indians" is a masterpiece, in my opinion. "Peter Straub's Ghost Story meets Liane Moriarty's Big Little Lies in this American Indian horror story of revenge on the Blackfeet Indian Reservation. Four American Indian men from the Blackfeet Nation, who were childhood friends, find themselves in a desperate struggle for their lives, against an entity that wants to exact revenge upon them for what they did during an elk hunt ten years earlier by killing them, their families, and friends." Jones is a huge fan of slasher films, and in this book, he has essentially created an elk slasher intent on murdering the humans who killed her years ago. I loved all the Native American references in this book and the way Jones uses the natural world as the aggressor within the story.
I'd describe "Bless Your Heart" by Lindy Ryan as "What if Designing Women were all undertakers and they had to rid their small town of the undead?" Part horror, part mystery, this book is quirky AND bloody. "Rise and shine. The Evans women have some undead to kill. It's 1999 in Southeast Texas and the Evans women, owners of the only funeral parlor in town, are keeping steady with...normal business. The dead die, you bury them. End of story. That's how Ducey Evans has done it for the last eighty years, and her progeny-Lenore the experimenter and Grace, Lenore's soft-hearted daughter, have run Evans Funeral Parlor for the last fifteen years without drama. Ever since That Godawful Mess that left two bodies in the ground and Grace raising her infant daughter Luna, alone. But when town gossip Mina Jean Murphy's body is brought in for a regular burial and she rises from the dead instead, it's clear that the Strigoi-the original vampire-are back. And the Evans women are the ones who need to fight back to protect their town. As more folks in town turn up dead and Deputy Roger Taylor begins asking way too many questions, Ducey, Lenore, Grace, and now Luna, must take up their blades and figure out who is behind the Strigoi's return. As the saying goes, what rises up, must go back down. But as unspoken secrets and revelations spill from the past into the present, the Evans family must face that sometimes, the dead aren't the only things you want to keep buried." I feel like this one could be a good entry into the genre for someone who might be interested in trying to read horror but not quite ready for something really over the top scary.
Speaking of entry points into the horror genre, "The September House" by Carissa Orlando is another good option. "You can survive anything. That's what Margaret tells herself when the walls of her house start to drip blood every September. She's learned how to live with it...and the other terrifying apparitions that have made the sprawling Victorian house she and her husband bought four years ago turn from a dream home into a living nightmare. But she can outlast all of it. Hal felt differently, though. Her husband couldn't take the hauntings anymore, and he left. But now he's not returning calls, and their daughter Katherine arrives, intent on looking for her missing father, convinced something grim has happened to him. With every desperate attempt Katherine makes at finding Hal, the hauntings at the September House grow more harrowing, because there are some secrets the house needs to keep." This book falls into the psychological horror genre blend.
You’ll find these titles and lots more in our “The Midnight Hour” display. For additional title suggestions, see the lists below:
