Spook-tober for Cowards Like Me 🎃

There are certain things we, as a society, have agreed October requires. Pumpkins. Decorative skeletons. Paying $9 for coffee because someone put cinnamon in it. And, for reasons I have never fully understood, recreational suffering.

Dread season is almost here, which means the leaves will soon be changing, the temperature will finally be dropping (or so they tell us), and apparently everyone (people I assume must hate themselves) has collectively decided this is a great time to read books specifically engineered to make sleeping more difficult.

No thank you.

Some of us want Halloween without spending four hundred pages trapped inside the deteriorating mental state of a Victorian governess while something with too many teeth scratches at the bedroom door.

Again, no thank you.

And this October, I’m diving into the classics because nothing says spooky season quite like old books about old houses filled with old problems that somehow still feel remarkably modern. It just feels right. Because vibes. I don’t make the rules. Those are my rules.

So here’s what qualifies for what I’m calling Spook-tober: give me fog. Give me old mansions. Give me ghosts, murder mysteries, suspicious aristocrats, thunderstorms, and possibly one deeply inconvenienced detective. But keep the actual horror to a minimum because, if we’re being honest here, I’m a coward who just wants the spooky vibes without the nightmares or therapy bill.

Look, one day I’ll read Dracula. But today is not that day.

Bonus points if I can finish the whole thing in a single evening and go to bed thinking, Well, that was fun, rather than staring suspiciously at the closet while contemplating my own existential dread.

I have, of course, done an unreasonable amount of research to assemble this list. I have checked plots, page counts, reviews, general levels of creepiness, and enough conflicting opinions from strangers on the internet that I now possess expertise in a field that does not exist.

This was a public service. I did this so you don’t have to, and not at all because I’m an obsessive person with a childhood-instilled need to overperform so my adoptive parents don’t send me back to the orphanage.

You’re welcome.

1. We Have Always Lived in the Castle — Shirley Jackson

The vibe: Gothic weirdness with a smile.

What it’s about: Merricat Blackwood lives in an isolated mansion with her sister, buries objects for magical protection, distrusts basically everyone, and is generally having a much stranger Tuesday than you are.

Why: Jackson’s prose is remarkably modern and accessible for a classic, and at around 150 pages, this is exactly the kind of commitment I’m looking for. It’s known for being dark, funny, bizarre, and wonderfully gothic without being traditional horror. Which sounds suspiciously like someone designed a book specifically to satisfy rules I invented twenty minutes ago.

Prediction: If Spook-tober has an official book, I have high hopes for this one. If I hate it, we will quietly remove this paragraph and deny it ever existed. Deal?

Goodreads rating at time of writing: 3.9/5

2. The Canterville Ghost — Oscar Wilde

The vibe: Imagine haunting a house and discovering the new owners are Americans who find you annoying.

What it’s about: An ancient English ghost attempts to terrorize the American family who has moved into his mansion. Unfortunately for him, they are profoundly unimpressed.

His chains squeak? They give him lubricant. He tries to frighten them? The children retaliate. This poor bastard has spent centuries perfecting his craft only to discover that his greatest natural predator is apparently American children. I can relate to that.

Why: Wilde basically takes the traditional haunted-house story and turns it into a comedy at the ghost’s expense. It’s witty, absurd, and roughly 100 pages long, meaning I can get an entire Victorian haunting finished before bedtime. Perfect. This is the sort of efficiency I’ve come to expect from the supernatural.

Prediction: It will be amazing because everything I’ve ever read by Wilde has been amazing. See Dorian Gray for details. No pressure, Oscar. You’re only defending a perfect record from beyond the grave.

Goodreads rating at time of writing: 3.9/5

3. Northanger Abbey — Jane Austen

The vibe: Girl reads too many gothic novels. Immediately becomes a menace to herself.

What it’s about: Catherine Morland loves sensational gothic fiction, so naturally, when she gets invited to stay at an actual abbey, her imagination starts transforming ordinary events into evidence that SOMETHING TERRIBLE HAS HAPPENED. (Does someone you know who watches too many crime documentaries on Netflix fit this description? If you said no, it’s you.)

Why: Austen wrote the novel as a satire of the gothic fiction wildly popular in her time, so we get creepy rooms, ominous suspicions, an abbey, and Jane Austen making fun of the exact genre she’s borrowing from. In other words, people were consuming too much disturbing entertainment, becoming convinced horrible things were happening everywhere, and then behaving irrationally because of it. Thank God we’ve solved that problem…

Disclaimer: There is romance because Austen was, regrettably, unwilling to consult my Spook-tober requirements before dying in 1817. I’ve decided to forgive her.

Prediction: I’ll spend the entire book thinking about true-crime documentaries and wondering how Austen managed to satirize their audience two hundred years before Netflix existed.

Goodreads rating at time of writing: 3.9/5

4. The Westing Game — Ellen Raskin

The vibe: Clue, but somebody turned it into a novel.

What it’s about: A millionaire dies. A group of eccentric strangers are assembled. There’s an inheritance, a mystery, clues everywhere, and approximately everyone is suspicious.

Why: This one is a fast-moving puzzle rather than anything approaching horror, which earns it immediate admission to Spook-tober. It’s famous for its elaborate mystery, eccentric cast, and the kind of clues that invite you to confidently announce that you’ve figured everything out.

This is dangerous because I am exactly the kind of person who will develop a theory on page 37, become emotionally attached to it by page 52, and spend the rest of the book interpreting all contradictory evidence as a personal attack.

So, essentially, somebody took all the ingredients necessary to make me completely insufferable for 200 pages and put them in one book. My wife is going to hate this.

Prediction: I fully intend to do this. And I fully expect to be wrong. I will nevertheless explain afterward why I was basically right.

Goodreads rating at time of writing: 4/5

5. And Then There Were None — Agatha Christie

The vibe: Cozy mystery has left the chat.

What it’s about: Ten strangers arrive at an isolated island mansion. Their mysterious host is nowhere to be found. Then people start dying.

This seems like an excellent point at which to leave the island, but apparently the ferry service has other plans.

Why: Admittedly, this is the selection where Spook-tober gets closest to violating its own bylaws. But this is Christie, so the machinery underneath all that menace is an intricately constructed mystery. It’s short, famously difficult to solve, and generally regarded as one of the great achievements of the genre.

So naturally, I’m going to solve it. Probably by chapter three. There is absolutely no reason to preserve this prediction for later.

Prediction: I will not, in fact, solve it.

Goodreads rating at time of writing: 4/5

BONUS: The Hound of the Baskervilles — Arthur Conan Doyle

The vibe: Sherlock Holmes briefly wanders into a gothic horror novel and refuses to cooperate.

What it’s about: After Sir Charles Baskerville is found dead on his estate under mysterious circumstances, his heir arrives from America to inherit Baskerville Hall. Unfortunately, he may have inherited something else too: a centuries-old curse involving a monstrous hound said to hunt down members of the Baskerville family.

Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson are brought in to determine whether something supernatural is stalking the moors or whether there’s a considerably more human explanation behind it all.

This is why you always read the disclosures before accepting inherited property.

Why: Basically, Doyle takes all the furniture from a gothic horror story and drops Sherlock Holmes into the middle of it. Which is perfect, because Holmes is professionally incapable of encountering something supernatural without immediately becoming suspicious of everyone involved.

Ancient curse? Evidence. Monstrous supernatural hound? Evidence. Terrified locals whispering about an unspeakable evil stalking the moors? Yes, yes. Very concerning. Now who had access to the estate?

I get the fog, the manor, the legend, and the enormous murderous dog. Sherlock gets the existential dread.

This arrangement seems fair.

Prediction: Holmes will have an entirely reasonable explanation for all of this and will figure it out approximately 175 pages before I do.

Goodreads rating at time of writing: 4/5