Spooky season is just starting and I’ve got the reads to send you screaming.
With Halloween right around the corner, it’s time to get in the seasonal mood and read some scary stories. Here are the top five gruesome and grisly good for her frights to read this spooky season.
1.) They Never Learn by Layne Fargo
English professor, Scarlett Clark searches for the worst man at Gorman University every year and plots his well-deserved demise. She’s careful and meticulous until one of her kills becomes a little too personal. Meanwhile, Gorman student Carly Schiller is just trying to survive her freshman year. However, when her best friend is sexually assaulted at a party, Carly becomes obsessed with making the attacker pay, turning her fantasies about revenge into a reality. This book has every shocking turn you can think of while centering around the revenge of scorned women like no other.
2.) Her Body and Other Parties by Carmen Maria Machado
In a series of short stories, Carmen Maria Machado creates harrowing narratives that perfectly capture the realities of women’s lives and the violence visited upon their bodies. Machado’s stories are full of ghosts, ghouls, and the lives of gory girls everywhere. Her Body and Other Parties is explosive and original; it sways from sexy to serious, comic to catastrophic in the same breath and it shows the unsettling nature of being a woman in a man’s world.
3.) Such a Pretty Smile by Kristi DeMeester
There’s something out there killing girls who don’t conform; girls who don’t know when to shut up. When past demons haunt Lila and her mother Caroline they must find the source of this power before it kills them. Such a Pretty Smile is a jaw-dropping novel, determined to show all the ways in which girls fight against the forces that try to oppress them, to keep them silent. This novel is a scream in the dark for anyone who has been told to sit down, shut up, and smile pretty.
4.) The Violence by Delilah S. Dawson
Chelsea Martin seems to be the model housewife. However, Chelsea’s husband has turned her life into a prison; he’s abusive and has been cutting off her independence, autonomy, and support. She has nowhere to turn, fearing her daughters will be caught in the same abusive cycle until a mysterious illness sweeps the nation. Called “The Violence”, this illness causes animalistic rage in the infected, causing them to attack anyone in their path. For Chelsea, this gives her a plan to liberate herself from her abuser. A chilling and raw novel, The Violence shows how three generations of women grapple with abuse and their new reality in a world growing more violent by the day.
5.) Bunny by Mona Awad
Samantha Heather Mackey couldn’t be more of an outsider at Warren University. She despises her fiction writing cohort–a clique of insufferably rich girls who solely refer to each other as “Bunny,” and seem to merge into one. Then, everything changes when Samantha receives an invitation to the Bunnies’ clique herself. As Samantha plunges deeper into the Bunnies’ sugar-scary world, she begins to take part in their “workshops”, conjuring fairy tale monsters while the edges of reality start to blur. This entrancing novel captures the exact female experience of desiring to belong in a world that pits women against each other to the extreme.
Happy reading ghouls!