Spooktacular Books by Writers Who Kill

Do you have a favorite spooky book? It doesn’t need ghosts, goblins, or vampires. The things that scare us may go bump in the night, but they often have plebian origins. Here’s our take on books that keep us up late at night, scary, mysterious, or true, it all makes for a great read. Especially around Halloween.

Heather Weidner: I have loved cozy mysteries since my whodunit habit started with Scooby-Doo and Nancy Drew. Some of my recent humorous Halloween favorites include Ellen Byron’s Bayou Boneyard and Libby Klein’s Mischief Nights are Murder. Both of these boast amateur sleuths who get themselves in and out of all kinds of sticky situations. Bree Baker’s Closely Harbored Secrets and Maya Corrigan’s Crypt Suzette are also great Halloween reads with a food flair. Baker’s series is set in a southern tea restaurant, and Corrigan’s sleuth creates recipes with five ingredients and solves murders with the help of her grandfather.

And our own Marilyn Levinson/Allison Brook’s Haunted Library series is another of my favorites. What’s not to love year-round –  books, a ghost, and mysteries.  

All of the books in each of these series are worth the read. Add them to your fall and winter reading lists.

Lori Roberts Herbst: I highly recommend The Once and Future Witches, by Alix E. Harrow. Published in 2020, it's a riveting character study and exploration of societal norms and expectations. The tension is high, but the best quality is the characters' self-growth, insight, and the bond the sisters form. What are they willing to do to save each other, themselves, and women in general?

Grace Topping: One of my favorite ghost stories is The Ghost and Mrs. Muir. It’s the story of a seafaring captain who haunts the home of a widow and the affection that develops between them. Most people who are familiar with the movie and the television series may not realize they were based on the book by R. A. Dick.

Connie Berry: The Turn of the Screw by Henry James: Psychologists tell us human beings are the only creatures who enjoy frightening themselves. That’s strange, is it not? And true. We love scary stories, especially told on a dark night before a blazing fire.

As an English Lit major, The Turn of the Screw was always one of my favorites—the lurking presence of evil, the mounting horror, the ambiguity. So, you can imagine my interest when in 2019 one of my favorite authors, Ruth Ware, published what NPR called “a clever and elegant update to James’s story.”

The Turn of the Key by Ruth Ware begins with a young woman, Rowan Caine, about to stand trial for the murder of a child in her care. She writes to her lawyer from prison, proclaiming her innocence. But is she telling the truth? She isn’t exactly innocent as it turns out, but is she guilty of murder?

K.M. Rockwood: Chesapeake Crimes: Magic is Murder. (Wildside Press, 2022) Amazon says: Mystery and magic collide in this thrilling, all-new collection of short stories by some of the top talents in the crime-writing field. Tales of fantasy worlds and stage illusion, of magic-users and magic-abusers, fill these pages with a heady, deadly mix! An anthology of sixteen short stories.

Molly MacRae: There are too many great mystery stories and novels with ghosts, witches, black cats, Halloween, and bumps-in-the-night written for adults for me to choose favorites – even if I limit the field to those by my Writers Who Kill blog-mates. But I don’t mind reverting to my library background in the children’s department at the public library where I had the pleasure of tending (haunting?) the children’s mystery section.

My favorite is . . . Dying to Meet You, Book #1 in the 43 Old Cemetery Road graphic epistolary mystery series for intermediate readers (ages 8-11), a collaborative effort by sisters Kate Klise (story) and M. Sarah Klise (illustrations).

The set-up: Cantankerous children’s mystery writer Ignatius B. Grumply moves into a Victorian mansion (complete with cupola) at 43 Old Cemetery Road hoping to have the peace and quiet he needs to crack a case of writer's block that’s been haunting him for far too long. But the house is already occupied by eleven-year-old Seymour Hope (who’s been abandoned by his parents), Seymour’s cat, Shadow, and Olive C. Spence, the irritable ghost of a never-published children’s mystery writer. No one is happy. To say the least. Then Seymour’s parents return with a dastardly plan to sell the mansion.

 

Told through letters, newspaper articles, a work-in-progress manuscript, and the occasional tombstone engraving, this book (the whole series) is the kind of kids’ mystery that grownups get a kick out of, too.

 

Readers – What’s your favorite bump in the night book?