5 Spooky Stories for People Who Don’t Like to Be Spooked
For some people, spooky season is about layering clothes, warm colors, and revisiting childhood favorites like the Goosebumps series, Casper, Hocus Pocus, and other scary-adjacent fair. For others, it’s a season to celebrate all things horror, from the scariest ghost stories to the goriest body horror narratives.
(How to Write Scary Novels Infused With Fun and Humor)
When it comes to horror, I tend to land somewhere in the middle. I like a good scary story, but I certainly air on the side of atmospheric more than truly terrifying. I prefer foggy fields to bloody walls, something weird to something wicked. Sometimes, I feel like I’m missing out on the excitement of spooky season because I lack the iron stomach for the truly horrifying. But like all genres, horror comes in many shapes and sizes, and I believe that there’s a spooky story for even the jumpiest reader.
Here are five spooky stories for people who don’t like to be spooked.
Her Fearful Symmetry by Audrey Niffenegger
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The least spooky book on this list; in fact, I’d say this isn’t spooky at all, it’s all atmosphere. Set in and near Highgate Cemetery in London, about the love between twins, men and women, ghosts and the living.
Julia and Valentina Poole are 20-year-old sisters with an intense attachment to each other. One morning the mailman delivers a thick envelope to their house in the suburbs of Chicago. Their English aunt Elspeth Noblin has died of cancer and left them her London apartment. There are two conditions for this inheritance: that they live in the flat for a year before they sell it and that their parents not enter it. Julia and Valentina are twins. So were the girls’ aunt Elspeth and their mother, Edie. The girls move to Elspeth’s flat, which borders the vast Highgate Cemetery, where Christina Rossetti, George Eliot, Stella Gibbons, and other luminaries are buried. Julia and Valentina become involved with their living neighbors: Martin, a composer of crossword puzzles who suffers from crippling OCD, and Robert, Elspeth’s elusive lover, a scholar of the cemetery. They also discover that much is still alive in Highgate, including—perhaps—their aunt.
Company of Liars by Karen Maitland
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Spooky-adjacent. Atmospheric, historical horror, and something a little sinister happening beneath the surface.
The year is 1348. In a world ruled by faith and fear, nine desperate strangers, brought together by chance, attempt to flee the certain death that is rolling inexorably toward them. Each traveler has a hidden gift, a dark secret, and a story to tell….From Camelot, the relic-seller, to Cygnus, the one-armed storyteller–from the strange, silent child Narigorm to a painter and his pregnant wife, each guards secrets closely. None are as they seem. And one among them conceals the darkest secret of all—propelling these liars to a destiny more perilous than any of them could imagine.
The Silent Companions by Laura Purcell
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A victorian ghost story? Sign me up!
When Elsie married handsome young heir Rupert Bainbridge, she believed she was destined for a life of luxury. But pregnant and widowed just weeks after their wedding, with her new servants resentful and the local villagers actively hostile, Elsie has only her late husband’s awkward cousin for company. Or so she thinks. Inside her new home lies a locked door, beyond which is a painted wooden figure–a silent companion–that bears a striking resemblance to Elsie herself. The residents of the estate are terrified of the figure, but Elsie tries to shrug this off as simple superstition—that is, until she notices the figure’s eyes following her.
The Weight of Blood by Tiffany D. Jackson
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Love Stephen King’s Carrie? Add this to your TBR now.
When Springville residents—at least the ones still alive—are questioned about what happened on prom night, they all have the same explanation … Maddy did it.
An outcast at her small-town Georgia high school, Madison Washington has always been a teasing target for bullies. And she’s dealt with it because she has more pressing problems to manage. Until the morning a surprise rainstorm reveals her most closely kept secret: Maddy is biracial. She has been passing for white her entire life at the behest of her fanatical white father, Thomas Washington.
After a viral bullying video pulls back the curtain on Springville High’s racist roots, student leaders come up with a plan to change their image: host the school’s first integrated prom as a show of unity. The popular white class president convinces her Black superstar quarterback boyfriend to ask Maddy to be his date, leaving Maddy wondering if it’s possible to have a normal life.
But some of her classmates aren’t done with her just yet. And what they don’t know is that Maddy still has another secret … one that will cost them all their lives.
Bunny by Mona Awad
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The spookiest and most delightfully weird book on this list.
Samantha Heather Mackey couldn’t be more of an outsider in her small, highly selective MFA program at New England’s Warren University. A scholarship student who prefers the company of her dark imagination to that of most people, she is utterly repelled by the rest of her fiction writing cohort–a clique of unbearably twee rich girls who call each other “Bunny,” and seem to move and speak as one.
But everything changes when Samantha receives an invitation to the Bunnies’ fabled “Smut Salon,” and finds herself inexplicably drawn to their front door–ditching her only friend, Ava, in the process. As Samantha plunges deeper and deeper into the Bunnies’ sinister yet saccharine world, beginning to take part in the ritualistic off-campus “Workshop” where they conjure their monstrous creations, the edges of reality begin to blur. Soon, her friendships with Ava and the Bunnies will be brought into deadly collision.
The spellbinding new novel from one of our most fearless chroniclers of the female experience, Bunny is a down-the-rabbit-hole tale of loneliness and belonging, friendship and desire, and the fantastic and terrible power of the imagination.
Spend the day learning techniques for honing your craft from four different published horror authors, and then (if you choose) you can have your query letter critiqued by one of our participating literary agents. The literary agent will provide you with a personalized critique of your query letter.