Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark, collected from folklore and retold by Alvin Schwartz; illustrations by Stephen Gammell.

More Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark, collected from folklore and retold by Alvin Schwartz; illustrations by Stephen Gammell.
These books haunted my childhood! Okay, these books are in the children’s room, but are still spooky enough for teens. C’mon, look at the cover illustrations! Spine-tingling! The illustrations throughout are enough to keep you up at night. The stories are collected from American folklore and have an urban legend feel to them. Familiar favorites that you might have heard in some form already include the Babysitter and the Hook. Definitely worth a re-read if you’re a fan of spooky stories. If you’ve never heard of this series, you need to pick up a copy ASAP.
Also worth noting, since we just celebrated Banned Books Week – this series of books has been one of the top ten most challenged books on the American Library Association’s list of banned and challenged books for being too violent, insensitive and inappropriate for its target age group. That’s pretty awesome.

Another great blast from the past are the books from R. L. Stine, author of the Goosebumps and Fear Street series. These fast, horror paperbacks are just the right amount of scary for a chilly fall evening. I remember reading The Stepsister and The Knife from my own teen years, but there are tons of other (humorously titled) tales such as:

The Dead Lifeguard and

Scream, Jennifer, Scream that you can pick up.
Classic horror never goes out of style, so why not take a look at the originals:
Bram Stoker’s Dracula

and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein?

You can always watch the old movies afterwards.
Old-school Halloween can be as scary or cheesy as you choose – just have fun!
Sharon Long
Teen Services Librarian

Halloween is just around the corner. Here are some book suggestions that are bound to be creepy reads. 

Living in a house that might possibly be haunted on the edge of town, a black-clad, shaggy-haired youth falls for an alluring girl before finding himself trapped by the house’s dark secrets.

Through twists and turns of fate, orphaned Mary seeks knowledge of life, love, and what lies beyond her walled village and the surrounding forest, where dwell the Unconsecrated, aggressive flesh-eating people who were once dead.

Bullied by a group of girls who claim that the Salem Witch Trial victims are their ancestors, Sam, a descendant of witch-hunter Cotton Mather, is also targeted by an angry ghost before realizing that she is at the center of a curse tracing back to the original trials.

Arriving in their aunt’s blood-colored, cursed manor, sisters Silla and Nori wonder at dark secrets and the identity of people who nobody else can see while the surrounding woods creep closer and closer, trapping them away from the outside world. By the author of The Dead House.