7 Classic Spooky Books You Need To Read This October
It’s officially fall! The trees are beginning to don their autumnal dress of warm, vibrant hues. The evening twilight gathers earlier and earlier. There’s a crisp bite to the air in the mornings.
This time of year it can be fun to align your reading fare with the season — the spooky season. If you enjoy having a chill up your spine to match the chill in the air but don’t want to deal with the surfeit of gore and evil all too prevalent in modern “scary stories,” you have to look no further than some tried-and-true classics, which you may just remember from high school literature courses.
These selections are more restrained, leave some things to the imagination, and often seek to impart a deeper moral message or show a character’s development as a person. They don’t promote or glorify gratuitous violence and darkness for its own sake as some contemporary tales are wont to do but they entertain nonetheless.
With that in mind, here are a few timeless novels that may not initially seem like a spooky or weird read but that still contain elements that create an eerie, suspenseful mood.
01 | Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë.
This novel is a staple of high school literature classes and though at first blush, one may not consider it a “spooky read,” it contains many of the elements of an uncanny, October tale. The titular heroine, Jane, starts off as a forlorn but passionate orphan who’
s mistreated by relatives and cruel school mistresses. She grows up to become governess to the ward of Mr. Rochester, the enigmatic and brooding master of the old mansion Thornfield Hall.
Jane’s goodness, frankness, and strength, despite her menial background, attracts the troubled Rochester and the two fall in love only for Jane to discover on the day of her wedding that her betrothed is already married to an insane wife whom he has hidden away in the attic of the mansion.
This demented woman is the cause of midnight fires and other mysterious goings-on that had aroused Jane’s curiosity. Jane runs away after learning of Rochester’s betrayal but eventually is drawn back to him by an almost spiritual, preternatural communication between their two hearts. She finds he's been blinded and maimed in a fire set by Bertha in which Bertha herself perished despite Rochester's attempts to save her.
All of these Gothic, gloomy qualities (though there is light-heartedness as well) combine to create quite an atmospheric story.
02 | The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne.
Hawthorne’s American classics are heavy with brooding, mysterious environments. The Scarlet Letter, set in Puritan New England, contains the time period's superstitions surrounding witchcraft, lending a creepy element to this tale of the shunned and ostracized Hester Prynne, her child Pearl, and the troubled minister Dimmesdale who carries a scandalous secret.
Imagery, symbolism, and conflict as well as themes of guilt and innocence, light and darkness, truth and deception, punishment and redemption all meld together in this suspenseful novel.
03 | The House of the Seven Gables by Nathaniel Hawthorne.
Another Hawthorne classic that contains many of the same weird and superstitious ingredients as The Scarlet Letter. A young woman Phoebe goes to care for her reclusive relatives in their old and lifeless ancestral home. The threads of Puritan superstition about witchcraft and the gloomy setting of the mansion make this a story weighty with atmosphere and mystery.
04 | Great Expectations by Charles Dickens.
This book is surprisingly suspenseful. The story opens with the protagonist Pip as a young orphan encountering an escaped convict in a foggy cemetery. Moving through the novel, one of the main characters that covertly propels some of the plot is Miss Havisham, a bitter and vindictive old woman living in a decaying mansion.
She was betrayed by her fiancé on their wedding day and has left the wedding cake and everything else in her home just as it was at the moment her life changed. She even stopped all the clocks- a moment frozen in time. Disillusioned and hardened, she's now training her protege Estella to toy with men's emotions and to hurt them as she had been hurt.
The aforementioned escaped convict also comes to play a pivotal role in the protagonist Pip's life and fortunes as a young man. There are numerous twists and turns and suspenseful moments throughout this Dickens tome.
Of course, I would be remiss not to mention some of the more obvious classic spooky tales, which may come to mind during October…
05 | The Hound of the Baskervilles by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.
This is a page-turning Sherlock Holmes mystery involving an ancient family curse, mysterious deaths, a potentially preternatural dog haunting an old estate, and the wild, lonely moors of England. Need I say more?
06 & 07 | Dracula by Bram Stoker & Frankenstein by Mary Shelley.
I’m pairing these two because they are almost synonymous with this time of year and are at the forefront of classic “scary stories.” They’re both admittedly on my to-be-read list, but from what I've heard and learned, they’re not simply tales of horror but really tales of good and evil with deeper philosophical and moral messages about the nature of man.
If you're more interested in short stories, there's always Washington Irving's “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow,” Oscar Wilde's comical “The Canterville Ghost” and nearly anything written by Edgar Allen Poe. The Ghost Stories of Edith Wharton is also an entertaining collection of creepy and thought-provoking short stories perfect for a gloomy fall afternoon.
In short…
Though these seemingly unlikely candidates for spooky novels are subtler with their creepiness, they are, nonetheless, satisfying. All of these classic tales, whether novel-length or short story, can offer that hair-raising thrill characteristic of this atmospheric time of year.
