31 Terrific October Reads

By no means an exhaustive list, but these stories will leave you gasping.

1.Clive Barker, "The Forbidden" (1985; In the Flesh).  A harrowing, masterfully-written tale set in late October, concerning a murderous figure born of urban legend.  Basis for the (Americanized) movie Candyman.

2.Robert Bloch, "Pranks" (1986; Halloween Horrors).  Ghoulish holiday fun, apropos of an author who once quipped, "I have the heart of a small boy.  I keep it in a jar on my desk."

3.Anthony Boucher, "Trick-or-Treat" (1945; Murder for Halloween: Tales of Suspense).  A hard-boiled Halloween mystery, about a racketeer gunned down in his own hideout when he answers his door to a trick-or-treater.

4.Ray Bradbury, "The October Game" (1948; 13 Horrors of Halloween).  Anyone who complains that Bradbury's stories are too saccharine has never read this gruesome tale of a kids' Halloween party gone awry.

5.Ray Bradbury, "The Emissary" (1947; The October Country).  A wandering dog is a bedridden boy's lone connection to the outside world, but one Halloween season the pet brings back something wicked.

6.Gary Braunbeck, "Tessellations" (2001; Graveyard People: The Collected Cedar Hill Stories).  Family heartache and Halloween weirdness abound in this moving Cedar Hill novella.

7.Esther Freisner, "Auntie Elspeth's Halloween Story, or The Gourd, the Bad, and the Ugly" (2001; The Ultimate Halloween).  Hilarious dramatic monologue, in which the titular Auntie gives her niece and nephews a Halloween tale they won't soon forget.

8.Neil Gaiman, "October in the Chair" (2002; Fragile Things: Short Fictions and Wonders).  An allegorical homage to Bradbury, with a bittersweet ghost story nested within.

9.Glen Hirshberg, "Mr. Dark's Carnival" (2000; The Two Sams: Ghost Stories).  Superlative narrative about the ultimate haunted attraction, located on the outskirts of a Montana town that goes all-out for Halloween.

10.Glen Hirshberg, "Struwwelpeter" (2001; The Two Sams).  A brilliant modern riff on the moralistic German children's book of the same title.  [Note: for an extended analysis of Hirshberg's novella, see my October 11th post, Anatomy of a Weird Tale.]

11.Charlee Jacob, "The Sticks" (2007; Cemetery Dance #57).  Exceptionally eerie story set in a cursed swampland town where the kids stay home on Halloween and the adults parade door-to-door.

12.Jack Ketchum, "Gone" (2000; October Dreams: A Celebration of Halloween).  One would think that losing a child to abduction would be the most devastating experience of a parent's life, but a still-grieving mother learns otherwise five years later on Halloween night.

13.Caitlin R. Kiernan, "A Redress for Andromeda" (2002; October Dreams: A Celebration of Halloween).  A wonderfully Lovecraftian narrative, featuring arcane rites, creatures from the abyss, and an ominous old home transformed into a virtual lighthouse by a slew of jack-o'-lanterns.

14.Dean Koontz, "The Black Pumpkin" (1986; October Dreams: A Celebration of Halloween).  Koontz's vengeful jack-o'-lantern monster is so hideous, it makes the eponymous demon of the movie Pumpkinhead seem photogenic.

15.Sarah Langan, "The Great Pumpkin Arrives At Last" (2008; Doorways #7).  The classic Peanuts cartoon forms the backdrop to this dark, disturbing tale, which concludes with a great plot twist.

16.Joe R. Lansdale, "On a Dark October" (1984; Bumper Crop).  A nasty little masterpiece detailing an inhumane Halloween ritual.   If Shirley Jackson had written splatterpunk...

17.Thomas Ligotti, "Alice's Last Adventure" (1988; Prime Evil: New Stories by the Masters of Modern Horror).  Decidedly eerie first-person narrative penned by an aged author of macabre children's books who is haunted by her own creation on Halloween night.

18.Thomas Ligotti, "Conversations in a Dead Language" (1989; October Dreams: A Celebration of Halloween).  Ligotti tries his hand at the Tales From the Crypt-type story of comeuppance, and succeeds chillingly.

19.Robert R. McCammon, "He'll Come Knocking at Your Door" (1986; Halloween Horrors).  "Giving the devil his due" is given a fiendish twist in this suspenseful Southern Gothic story.

20.Gary McMahon, "Pumpkin Night" (2007; The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror 19).  Intricately-detailed account of jack-o'lantern carving and unholy resurrection.

21.Robert Morrish, "There Are Corners of the World Where Lost Things Gather" (2002; Octoberland).  This expertly-structured coming-of-age tale builds to a terrifying climax inside an old dark house on Halloween.

22.William F. Nolan, "The Halloween Man" (1986; The Ultimate Halloween).  A splendidly dark tale, about a ten-year-old girl's obsession with a rumored bogeyman who steals children's souls on the night of the 31st.

23.Norman Partridge, "Treats" (1990; Johnny Halloween: Tales of the Dark Season).  The candy-tampering motif has never been more creepily employed than in this tiny gem of a story.

24.Stephen Mark Rainey, "The Jack-O'-Lantern Memoirs" (2000; Octoberland).  A deceased serial killer is given an annual chance to escape his damnation if he can refrain from killing anyone when returned to Earth on Halloween night.   Easier said than done...

25.Al Sarrantonio, "The Corn Dolly" (1984; Toybox).  Bradbury meets King in this haunting account of an October festival and a cornfield deity.

26.Al Sarrantonio, "Hornets" (2001; Hornets and Others).  If you don't have a phobia about hornets, you just might develop one after reading this weird October tale.

27.Jack Slay Jr., "Halloween: An Acrostic of Little Horrors" (2007; Cemetery Dance #57).  Brief but frightful collection of nine interlocking vignettes, in which children encounter horrors both natural and supernatural.

28.Steve Rasnic Tem, "Trickster" (1986; Halloween Horrors).  In life, the narrator's brother was a terrible practical joker; in death, his pranks are even worse.

29.Jeffrey Thomas, "Post #153" (2000; Octoberland).  Atmospheric tale concerning a local VFW besieged on a rainy Halloween night by the ghosts of war victims.

30.Gahan Wilson, "Yesterday's Witch" (1972; Murder for Halloween: Tales of Suspense).  Wilson, unsurprisingly, puts a darkly humorous spin on the notion of "trick-or-treating."

31.F. Paul Wilson, "Buckets" (1989; October Dreams: A Celebration of Halloween).  Trick-or-treaters harry an abortionist, in one of the most gruesome and unnerving Halloween stories ever written.


So there's a full assortment of treats guaranteed to satisfy the biggest Halloween junky.  Happy reading!