Mmmwwwwuuuaaa ha ha hhhhhhhhhhhhaaaaaaaaaaaaaa…
1) The Graveyard Book by Neil Gaiman
Neil Gaiman’s The Graveyard Book is a fascinating, original, and creepy little story, gauranteed to mesmerize you.
Book Jacket:
Nobody Owens, known to his friends as Bod, is a normal boy. He would be completely normal if he didn’t live in a sprawling graveyard, being raised and educated by ghosts, with a solitary guardian who belongs neither to the world of the living nor the dead. There are dangers and adventures in the graveyard for a boy – an ancient Indigo Man beneath the hill, a gateway to a desert leading to an abandoned city of ghouls, the strange and terrible menace of the Sleer. But if Bod leaves the graveyard, then he will come under attack by the man Jack – who has already killed Bod’s family…
You can read an excerpt here (OR you can watch Neil read the entire book, chapter by chapter, here.)
2) The Witches by Roald Dahl
Still the scariest witches I’ve ever read.
Book Jacket:
Meet a hero, a wise old grandmother, and the most gruesome, grotesque gang of witches imaginable!
“In fairy tales witches always wear silly black hats and black cloaks and they ride on broomsticks. But this is not a fairy tale. This is about REAL WITCHES. REAL WITCHES dress in ordinary clothes and look very much like ordinary women. They live in ordinary houses and they work in ordinary jobs. That is why they are so hard to catch.”
3) The Tell-Tale Heart by Edgar Allen Poe
Poe is deliciously disturbing, always.
Short story description:
The Tell-Tale Heart follows an unnamed narrator who commits a murder and then starts to think he hears the dead man’s heart still beating underneath the floorboards, where he hid the body.
You can read the story here.
4) The Replacement by Brenna Yovanoff
Creepily sweet and sweetly creepy, just like a Tim Burton movie.
Book Jacket:
Mackie Doyle seems like everyone else in the perfect little town of Gentry, but he is living with a fatal secret – he is a Replacement, left in the crib of a human baby sixteen years ago. Now the creatures under the hill want him back, and Mackie must decide where he really belongs and what he really wants.
A month ago, Mackie might have told them to buzz off. But now, with a budding relationship with tough, wounded, beautiful Tate, Mackie has too much to lose. Will love finally make him worthy of the human world?
You can read an excerpt here.
5) Roald Dahl’s Book of Ghost Stories
You really can never go wrong with Roald Dahl.
Book Jacket:
Who better to investigate the literary spirit world than that supreme connoisseur of the unexpected, Roald Dahl? Of the many permutations of the macabre or bizarre, Dahl was always especially fascinated by the classic ghost story. As he relates in the erudite introduction to this volume, he read some 749 supernatural tales at the British Museum Library before selecting the 14 that comprise this anthology. “Spookiness is, after all, the real purpose of the ghost story,” Dahl writes. “It should give you the creeps and disturb your thoughts.” For this superbly disquieting collection, Dahl offers favorite tales by such masterful storytellers as E. F. Benson, J. Sheridan Le Fanu, Rosemary Timperley, and Edith Wharton.
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