Ghost Stories Book Roundup
Gather around a warm bonfire with a flashlight and friends to read from this top ghost stories book list that is perfect for fall aka spooky season!
The perfect book list full of spine-shivering stories, eerie settings, supernatural mysteries, paranormal sightings, and horrors of the unknown to entertain yourself or a group of friends. You’ll can become witness to these narratives told in truth about traumatizing and freaky real life events. Or perhaps you are more interested in a ghost stories book on potential fictional tales from mystical, dark worlds with demons, séances, and more. Either way these stories are guaranteed to haunt you with every line you read.
Please enjoy these top 12 spooky reads from famous storytellers, horror authors, supernaturalists, and more.
BEWARE! Read at your own risk!
Trigger Warning: Short Fictions and Disturbances
by Neil Gaiman
Multiple award winning, #1 New York Times bestselling author Neil Gaiman returns to dazzle, captivate, haunt, and entertain with this third collection of short fiction following Smoke and Mirrors and Fragile Things–which includes a never-before published American Gods story, “Black Dog,” written exclusively for this volume.
Here in the Night
by Rebecca Turkewitz
The thirteen stories in Rebecca Turkewitz’s debut collection, Here in the Night, are engrossing, strange, eerie, and emotionally nuanced.
With psychological insight and finely crafted prose, Here in the Night investigates the joys and constraints of womanhood, of queerness, and of intimacy. Preoccupied with all manner of hauntings, these stories traverse a boarding school in the Vermont woods, the jagged coast of Maine, an attic in suburban Massachusetts, an elevator stuck between floors, and the side of an unlit highway in rural South Carolina.
These stories will stay with you.
I Hold a Wolf by the Ears: Stories
by Laura Van Den Berg
ONE OF TIME‘S 10 BEST FICTION BOOKS OF 2020. Longlisted for the Joyce Carol Oates Prize. Named a Best Book of 2020 by NPR, Bustle, Good Housekeeping, the New York Public Library, Library Journal, Lit Hub, Electric Literature, and Tor.com
I Hold a Wolf by the Ears, Laura van den Berg’s first story collection since her prizewinning book The Isle of Youth, draws readers into a world of wholly original, sideways ghost stories that linger in the mouth and the mind. Both timeless and urgent, these eleven stories confront misogyny, violence, and the impossible economics of America with van den Berg’s trademark spiky humor and surreal eye. Moving from the peculiarities of Florida to liminal spaces of travel in Mexico City, Sicily, and Iceland, I Hold a Wolf by the Ears is uncannily attuned to our current moment, and to the fears we reveal to no one but ourselves.
Echoes: The Saga Anthology of Ghost Stories
The essential collection of beloved ghost stories, compiled by the editor who helped define the genre. It includes stories from award-winning, bestselling authors such as Joyce Carol Oates, Alice Hoffman, Seanan McGuire, and Paul Tremblay.
Everyone loves a good ghost story, especially Ellen Datlow–the most lauded editor in short works of supernatural suspense and dark fantasy. The Saga Anthology of Ghost Stories is her definitive collection of ghost stories. Whether you’re reading alone under the covers with a flashlight or around a campfire, there’s something here to and spook everyone.
Ghosts by Gaslight
by Jack Dann – Nick Gevers
An absolutely mind-boggling gathering of some of today’s very best dark storytellers. Ghosts by Gaslight offers chilling gothic and spectral tales in a delightfully twisted Victorian and Edwardian vein.
Think Henry James’s Turn of the Screw and Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde with a decidedly steampunk edge, and you’re ready to confront Ghosts by Gaslight.
Haunting of Hajji Hotak and Other Stories
by Jamil Jan Kochai
FINALIST FOR THE 2022 NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FOR FICTION
WINNER OF THE 2023 ASPEN WORDS LITERARY PRIZE, AND THE 2023 O. HENRY PRIZE
NAMED ONE OF THE NEW YORKER’S BEST BOOKS OF 2022
Jamil Jan Kochai breathes life into his contemporary Afghan characters, moving between modern-day Afghanistan and the Afghan diaspora in America. These are arresting stories verging on both comedy and tragedy. They often star young characters whose bravado is matched by their tenderness. Kochai once again captures “a singular, resonant voice, an American teenager raised by Old World Afghan storytellers.”
Muckross Abbey and Other Stories
by Sabina Murray
“I binge-read this book, savoring the gothic creepiness at the heart of each tale. Packed with compelling, nuanced lives and the deaths that haunt them, each story is a séance–an invitation for unsettled spirits to let their presence be known”–Mona Awad, author of All’s Well
Sabina Murray has long been celebrated for her mastery of the gothic. Now in Muckross Abbey and Other Stories, she returns to the genre, bringing readers to haunted sites from a West Australian convent school to the moors of England to the shores of Cape Cod in ten strange tales that are layered, meta, and unforgettable.
Strange is the Night
by S P Miskowski
Over cocktails an executive describes to a friend the disturbing history of a strangely potent guardian angel. A young mom tries to perfect and prolong her daughter’s childhood with obsessive parenting. A critic’s petty denouncement of an ingénue’s performance leads to a theatrical night of reckoning. A cult member makes nice for a parole board hearing years after committing an infamous crime.
Best Horror of the Year
by Ellen Datlow
From Ellen Datlow (“the venerable queen of horror anthologies” (New York Times) comes a new entry in the series that has brought you stories from Stephen King and Neil Gaiman comes 25thrilling stories, the best horror stories available.
For more than three decades, Ellen Datlow has been at the center of horror. Bringing you the most frightening and terrifying stories, Datlow always has her finger on the pulse of what horror readers crave. Now Datlow is back again to bring you the stories that will keep you up at night. Encompassed in the pages of The Best Horror of the Year have been such illustrious writers as: Neil Gaiman, Kim Newman, Stephen King, Linda Nagata, Laird Barron, Margo Lanagan, and many others.
Where the Wild Ladies Are
by Aoko Matsuda – Polly Barton
In this “delightfully uncanny” collection of feminist retellings of traditional Japanese folktales (The New York Times Book Review), humans live side by side with spirits who provide a variety of useful services–from truth-telling to babysitting, from protecting castles to fighting crime.
A busybody aunt who disapproves of hair removal. A pair of door-to-door saleswomen hawking portable lanterns. A cheerful lover who visits every night to take a luxurious bath. A silent house-caller who babysits and cleans while a single mother is out working.
Out of Water
by Sarah Read
THIS IS AN INVITATION TO DROWNING.
These are the stories of things out of water–of sea bed deserts choked with ghosts; of the lonely, roving children of the fen. Here your garden grows belowground.
You will be born into a cradle of your own bones, shadows will burst from your eyes, and your mouth will fill with thorns. Storms will twist inside you, and the ghosts of your past will follow you and chart your future.
Ghost Sequences
by A C Wise
From A.C. Wise, the acclaimed author of Wendy, Darling, comes a brand new collection of horror stories, The Ghost Sequences. Wise showcases 16 brilliant stories in this immersive, ghostly collection. With beautiful prose, unique takes, and a broad range of tones and approaches to the horror genre, this is a collection to be savored.
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