All Hallow’s Read

I said earlier that I had originally hoped to post a book recommendation a day for the entire month of October. Part of the impetus for this was to have something to do for the Countdown to Halloween, but part of it was also Neil Gaiman’s All Hallow’s Read. The gist of All Hallow’s Read is to start a new tradition where you give people scary books to read on Halloween. I think that’s a great tradition, and it’s something I wanted to support. So, since I can’t actually give everyone a scary book, I was going to suggest a bunch of them.

Again, that’s not going to happen, at least, not in the depth I would have liked. But while I may not be able to go all out, I did do some thinking about what I would have suggested, had I had the time, and while I can’t do a suggestion a day, with explanations of why, I can still suggest 31 great scary books. To make it a little harder on myself, I restricted it no more than one book by the same author, and to no books by Mike Mignola. (Do I still need to suggest books by Mike Mignola? If so, this is me suggesting all of them.) To make it a little easier on myself, I let myself do whole series, rather than picking individual installments. Beyond that there’s no real rhyme or reason here, besides that these are spooky books that I like.

Without further ado (and in no particular order):

31. Tales, H.P. Lovecraft
30. Count Magnus & Other Ghost Stories, M.R. James
29. The Collected Ghost Stories of E.F. Benson
28. The Savage Tales of Solomon Kane, Robert E. Howard
27. The Casebook of Carnacki the Ghost Finder, William Hope Hodgson
26. Owls Hoot in Daytime & Other Omens, Manly Wade Wellman
25. The Ghostly Best Stories of Robert Westall (2 volumes)
24. Something Wicked This Way Comes, Ray Bradbury
23. A Night in the Lonesome October, Roger Zelazny
22. Hell House, Richard Matheson
21. A Coven of Vampires, Brian Lumley
20. Cabal, Clive Barker
19. The Graveyard Book, Neil Gaiman
18. The Courtney Crumrin books, Ted Naifeh (4+ volumes)
17. Gothic!, edited by Deborah Noyes
16. The Bone Key, Sarah Monette
15. The Monstrumologist books, Rick Yancey (3 volumes so far)
14. The Dylan Dog Case Files, Tiziano Sclavi
13. Beasts of Burden: Animal Rites, Evan Dorkin & Jill Thompson
12. The Enterprise of Death, Jesse Bullington
11. Uzumaki, Junji Ito (3 volumes)
10. Occultation & Other Stories, Laird Barron
9. The Darkly Splendid Realm, Richard Gavin
8. Mr. Gaunt & Other Uneasy Encounters, John Langan
7. The Man with the Barbed-Wire Fists, Norman Partridge
6. Basic Black, Terry Dowling
5. Worse Than Myself, Adam Golaski
4. Saga of the Swamp Thing hardcovers, Alan Moore & others
3. Creepy Presents: Bernie Wrightson
2. Jack Kirby’s The Demon
1. Creatures, edited by John Langan & Paul Tremblay*

*Yeah, this is skirting my rule about no two works by the same person. Also, I haven’t finished reading this one yet. But hey, it’s my list, and monster anthology!