Tuesday Tea: What are you reading for Spooky Season?
Share your favorites and what's on your TBR
During September and October, the books, TV shows, and food filling our days here in Strong Sense of Place HQ take a deliberately spooky turn. We post a schedule of scary movies on the fridge to watch on the weekends, soup simmers on the stove, roasted pumpkin seeds get added to our salads, and ghost stories, Gothic tales, and horror novels show up on the end table in the living room, our podcast players, and our Kindles.
This year, we’re spending a lot of time with productions and adaptations of Macbeth to prepare for the (sure to be awesome) experience of seeing David Tennant as Macbeth in London on Halloween (!).
Dave’s Spooky Season TBR…
This season, I’m looking forward to spending a weekend with How to Sell a Haunted House by Grady Hendrix. It’s a mix of horror and humor about a woman trying to unload her family home, only to find out that the house has ideas of its own about that.
Mel’s Spooky Season TBR…
As I mentioned in this episode of The Library of Lost Time — where I recommended the vampire story So Thirsty by Rachel Harrison — I’m going all-in on her books. Next up is the audio novella The Veil. I’m currently listening to Wilkie Collins’ classic The Woman in White, and the narration is fantastic. I’ve read this book before on the page, but the audio is even better. Fully immersive, and the voice work improves some of the denser 19th-century prose.
Two books I’m excited to read are The Hitchcock Hotel by Stephanie Wrobel (out tomorrow), a murder mystery set at a secluded hotel run by Alfred Hitchcock’s number one fan — and Bound in Blood, an anthology of 19 stories of cursed and haunted books. The latter includes a story by Elizabeth Hand, who wrote one of my favorite books from last Halloween season: A Haunting on the Hill, a sequel to Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House with the haunted mansion exerting its evil influence on a new set of characters; hear me talk about it here.
Mel’s 2023 Spooky Season Reads
I read these books last year and talked about them on The Library of Lost Time, in case you want a reminder or need some fresh blood to add to your TBR:
Black River Orchard by Chuck Wendig: a diabolically fun (and fairly gory) comedy-horror about apples that are so irresistibly delicious that they ruin the lives of everyone in a small town. Listen here.
Black Sheep by Rachel Harrison: another comedy-horror in which a girl named Vesper — #TeamVesper4Ever — learns a devilish family secret. Listen here.
The Only One Left by Riley Sager: a Gothic novel inspired by the legend of Lizzie Borden, set in an isolated mansion in Maine overlooking the sea. Listen here.
For all your Spooky Season needs, be sure to visit our Halloween destination page for our Halloween podcast, 45 book recommendations, a killer Halloween playlist (created by DJ Dave), an ode to vampires, four amazing poems, four irresistible recipes, and the answer to the question, What is Gothic anyway?
Just cracked open Jane Eyre as my first official fall read of the year! Sooo excited to settle into fall vibes. (I live in Florida, where fall basically just means adding pumpkin flavor to summer, so I’ve found that really leaning into seasonal reads is a way to still feel the excitement of the changing seasons, and it is delightful.)
After I’ve finished catching up with Jane, I’m thinking A Deadly Education by Naomi Novik will be a good way to satisfy my campus novel itch at the same time as fulfilling the October spooky reading vibe.
I'm reading The Blackbird Oracle by Deborah Harkness after binge watching all of Discovery of Witches on two very long airplane flights.