October is one of our favourite months here at Cyanide Mysteries HQ. The Halloween decor, horror movies, spooky snacks and cosy evenings with a book, blanket and hot beverage.
To honour the best month of the year, here's our list of spooky season book recommendations:
A gothic tale that takes place on the wild and windy Yorkshire Moors. (What else is set on the Yorkshire Moors I hear you ask. Our fictional village of Little Witchell would be around 20 miles from the Brontë's hometown of Haworth, if it were real.) It's a story about love, obsession, revenge and death; if you haven't already got around to it, now's your chance! (Fun fact - I wrote my English Literature dissertation on Wuthering Heights.)
Catherine House is the most bizarre university you will ever read about. Its students will have no contact with the outside world for three years while studying there. As our protagonist, Ines, is drawn in by the university's power and magnetism, she begins to discover what really happens behind the doors of Catherine House.
Chilling, haunting and utterly riveting, The Broken Girls follows a group of girls in the 1950s at Idlewild Hall, a school for unwanted girls, when one of them goes missing. In the present day, a journalist believes there's more to be discovered about the unsolved murder of her sister, near the ruins of Idlewild Hall.
If you're ever wanted to read a horror story set in an IKEA - Horrorstör is the book for you. When stock is mysteriously vandalised overnight, employees of this Swedish furniture superstore keep an overnight watch, and find out what was really causing all that destruction. A bonus - the physical book is set out like an IKEA catalogue!
A complex narrative and an unreliable, untrustworthy narrator, Penance tells the story of the murder of a 16-year-old girl in a fictional seaside town on the North Yorkshire coast. It examines true crime as a genre and the sensationalised and exploitative nature of the media in reaction to such events. One of the biggest horrors of the book - the things a teenage girl can get up to on Tumblr.
I like to think of C.J. Tudor as the British Stephen King. The Chalk Man answers the question of 'what if IT and The Body (Stand By Me) were set in an idyllic English village. A teenager in the 1980s, Eddie and his friends started a harmless game, drawing chalk men, until it leads them to a body. Thirty years later, Eddie believes the past is all behind him, until a fresh chalk man drawing appears through his letterbox.
A masterful gothic horror novel that takes place in a decaying mansion in 1950s Mexico. A young socialite receives a letter from her cousin, who is unwell at her new husband's family estate. Noemi arrives to investigate and soon discovers what is afflicting the mansion and its inhabitants.
The queen of gothic horror, We Have Always Lived in the Castle is Jackson's best, in my opinion. Set in the Blackwood family home, Constance was acquitted of murdering her parents, but the rest of the village don't seem to think so. The remaining Blackwoods are isolated to the outside world, but when Cousin Charles arrives, they will need to protect their peculiar way of living.
Note: These are affiliate links. If you purchase something using one of these links, we'll get a small commission at no extra cost to you.
Commenti