Haunted October- Recommended Reads

Halloween Reading Month! 

This week's recommended reads

Need something creepy to get you in the Halloween mood?

Try these gems!

The Haunting of Hill House has been hailed as a perfect work of unnerving terror. It is the story of four seekers who arrive at a notoriously unfriendly pile called Hill House: Dr. Montague, an occult scholar looking for solid evidence of a "haunting"; Theodora, his lighthearted assistant; Eleanor, a friendless, fragile young woman well acquainted with poltergeists; and Luke, the future heir of Hill House. At first, their stay seems destined to be merely a spooky encounter with inexplicable phenomena. But Hill House is gathering its powers—and soon it will choose one of them to make its own.

1867. Eliza Caine arrives in Norfolk to take up her position as governess at Gaudlin Hall on a dark and chilling night. As she makes her way across the station platform, a pair of invisible hands push her from behind into the path of an approaching train. She is only saved by the vigilance of a passing doctor.

When she finally arrives, shaken, at the hall she is greeted by the two children in her care, Isabella and Eustace. There are no parents, no adults at all, and no one to represent her mysterious employer. The children offer no explanation. Later that night in her room, a second terrifying experience further reinforces the sense that something is very wrong.

From the moment she rises the following morning, her every step seems dogged by a malign presence which lives within Gaudlin’s walls. Eliza realizes that if she and the children are to survive its violent attentions, she must first uncover the hall’s long-buried secrets and confront the demons of its past

On a split of land cut off by the Gulf, three Victorian summer houses stand against the encroaching sand. Two of the houses at Beldame are still used. The third house, filling with sand, is empty...except for the vicious horror which is shaping nightmares from the nothingness that hangs in the dank, fetid air.

The McCrays and Savages, two fine Mobile families allied by marriage, have been coming to Beldame for years. This summer, with a terrible funeral behind them and a messy divorce coming up, even Luker McCray and little India down from New York are looking forward to being alone at Beldame.

But they won't be alone. For something there, something they don't like to think about, is thinking about them...and about all the ways to make them die

Haunted October- The Feeding by Amy Lukavics

https://www.wattpad.com/175947729-the-feeding-part-1
There’s something deadly creeping in the woods outside of the small, sleepy town of Willows. Something with eight legs, sharp fangs and a connection to a local man who died years ago. It needs to feed, and new-to-town Craig is about to find himself on the menu

This is a short online story that Amy Lukavics wrote. It is very much worth the read this Halloween. Especially if you fear spiders. 

I don't like spiders, in general. They are skittery many-legged horrors that you find in weird places suddenly and without notice. I had a rule: if they are outside I leave them alone, but if they come into the house they die. In fa,ct someone spider corpses stay on the wall a week as a warning to other spiders.

So reading this was a bit difficult as it made my skin crawl and I felt really bad for the kid; Craig.

If you are afraid of clowns and spiders you may want to stay far away from this one...or maybe you will want to delve in...Scaring yourself is half the fun.

Haunted October - The Girl in the Locked Room by Mary Downing Hahn

A family moves into an old, abandoned house. Jules's parents love the house, but Jules is frightened and feels a sense of foreboding. When she sees a pale face in an upstairs window, though, she can't stop wondering about the eerie presence on the top floor—in a room with a locked door. Could it be someone who lived in the house a century earlier?
Her fear replaced by fascination, Jules is determined to make contact with the mysterious figure and help unlock the door. Past and present intersect as she and her ghostly friend discover—and change—the fate of the family who lived in the house all those many years ago

I received an ARC of this from NetGalley in return for an honest review

This was a short, fast pace middle-grade ghost story. It didn't take me long to read and it was pretty good. Interesting plot and characters.

Some things were super convenient to the plot, forcibly moving the characters along, rather than organically.  I did find the author using an old fantasy series to help Jules solve the mystery rather creative. In fact until this book I didn't even know who Diana Wynne Jones was.

The chapters go back and forth between Lily, the ghost, and Jules the living girl in the present.

The book delves into Jules home life where she's been moved from town to town and school to school because of her dad's job and how much she wants to stay in one place and be able to make friends. She is quite relatable and her parents quirky and fleshed out.

Jules grows as a character, she really talks to her parents about how lonely she's been, that she worries about being the new girl in school, again. Then we get to see her become instant BFF's with a local girl who helps her figure out how to help the ghost locked in the room,

While it wasn't, for me, creepy. This book had a ton of elements I like in my ghost stories and put in some you don't usually see. Like other times lines and dimensions.

I'll be buying this for my 9 years old, as I find a younger audience will really appreciate this novel. A cute way to start off my Halloween reading month.