Night comes a little earlier and a shade darker. Mushrooms and spiderwebs magically multiply. The morning chill creeps a little deeper into your bones. There’s a persistent longing for creamy potato soup. It is spooky time! If you don’t generally read in the horror genre, fall is the best time to drift that way. Here are a few titles worth reading while you slurp up something hot and fattening.
Paranormal Investigations
The Haunting of Room 904 by Erika T. Wurth (2025)
Wurth is new to the horror game and mixes a fast-paced noir with paranormal tendrils prying open worlds better kept shut. In her second novel, set in Denver, the Brown Hotel hires investigator Olivia Becente to help them understand why every few years a woman is found dead in room 904, no matter what room she checked into the night before. Ever since her sister’s unexpected & strange death, Becente can’t stop seeing and hearing from the dead which gives her some added insight into what is happening at the Brown Hotel. As she goes deeper into the investigation, the past begins to collide with the present and Becente learns more about her sister’s death than she cares to know. There are pagan cults, corrupt journalists, friend betrayals and ghostly visitations that will keep you reading into the night.
Psychological Thriller
Fox: A Novel by Joyce Carol Oats (2025)
Who doesn’t like a book set at an east coast elite boarding school with a little murder thrown into the halls. Everyone loves Mr. Fox, the charming new English teacher. But when his car is found submerged in the swamp with unidentified body parts scattered in the woods, people begin to question his character, especially Detective Horace Zwender. Disturbing relationship patterns begin to emerge. A classic victim verses predator, psychological thriller where the limits of revenge against evil is called into question. Oats illustrates the spiraling path of innocence to criminal like no other.
Literary Horror or Native American Gothic
The Buffalo Hunter Hunter by Stephen Graham Jones (2025)
Jones’ collection of novels and short stories dates back to 2000, but in the last five years his “final-girl” slasher works have gained wide appeal. A member of the Blackfeet tribe, he uses mythology, magical realism and native symbolism to create an atmosphere within his writing that is transformative, as in while reading you may forget you’re sitting in your comfortable home as a sense of foreboding permeates the air. This historical novel follows the life of Good Stab, a Blackfeet Indian as he seeks justice on the Montana plains in 1912 following a massacre of 217 Blackfeet. Jones also uses irony and dark humor to acknowledge and bring to light uncomfortable themes of racism and cultural blindness.
Graphic Horror
From Hell : Being a Melodrama in Six Parts by Alan Moore (1999)
Set in Whitechaple, the poor neighborhood in London where serial killer Jack the Ripper took the lives of at least five women in the fall of 1888, From Hell follows the theory the murders were part of a conspiracy to cover up the birth of an illegitimate royal child fathered by Prince Albert Victor. There is a high level of Victorian creepiness in the text and especially in the illustrations. The black and white drawings evoke desperation and evil born from privilege and the occult (there’s a touch of Freemason weirdness). While the Queen wields power, most women are rendered oppressively without agency, giving the reader a disquieting feeling of witnessing misogyny at its most brutal expression. There’s a lot in this story, including ideas about all time being concurrent and societal responsibility for individual crime. If you pick this one up, give yourself time to digest it in its entirety.