Six Books to Read This Fall & Before Halloween

1. The Thirteenth Tale — Diane Setterfield

If you like your autumn reading with old houses, family secrets, mysterious authors, ghosts, governesses, and enough buried history to keep an entire cemetery occupied, The Thirteenth Tale should probably be sitting somewhere near the top of your pile.

Vida Winter is a famous, reclusive author who has spent decades telling different versions of her own life. Now, old and ill, she summons biographer Margaret Lea to finally tell the truth—and sends her into a story involving Angelfield House, the strange March family, twins, a devastating fire, and secrets that have been waiting rather patiently to come back to life. The tale is gothic without being relentlessly grim, mysterious without becoming silly, and gloriously bookish. In other words, precisely the sort of novel that makes you want to read another novel while you’re reading it!

Pair with: a pot of Earl Grey, a blanket, and the kind of evening when nobody needs to know where you are.

2. The October Country — Ray Bradbury

The October Country is a collection of macabre short stories inhabited by strange creatures, unsettling situations, dark humor, and the particular sort of melancholy that Bradbury does so beautifully. It includes stories such as “The Emissary,” “The Scythe,” “The Wind,” “Homecoming,” and “The Wonderful Death of Dudley Stone.” But don’t expect straightforward horror. Bradbury’s darkness is often dreamlike and oddly beautiful. There are shadows here, yes, but there is also nostalgia, wonder, loneliness, and that peculiar feeling that the days themselves are hiding something!

This is the book to pick up when you want a story before bed but don’t necessarily want to commit to a 400-page descent into madness. Pair with: an apple dessert, a crackling fire, and absolutely no reason to look out the window.

3. The September House — Carissa Orlando

Buying an old house is always a little risky. Buying one that becomes dramatically more haunted every September is perhaps slightly more so!

Margaret has finally found her dream home with her husband, Hal. The house is beautiful, the price was suspiciously reasonable, and there is just one tiny problem: every September, the house becomes spectacularly haunted. Blood appears on the walls, ghosts emerge, and something much worse lurks in the basement. Margaret, however, has no intention of leaving… The September House takes the haunted-house novel and gives it a darkly funny, surprisingly human twist. Beneath the ghosts and gore is a story about marriage, endurance, and the things people learn to live with when leaving seems more complicated than staying.

Pair with: a glass of red wine, a very old squeaky house, and preferably a functioning exit.

4. The Little Stranger — Sarah Waters

Now we’re getting into quieter territory: There’s no carnival; no witches announcing themselves with dramatic entrances; no convenient thunderclap every time somebody opens a door. Just a crumbling country house, a family in decline, and the creeping suspicion that something is very wrong.

Set in postwar Warwickshire, The Little Stranger follows Dr. Faraday, a country physician called to Hundreds Hall, once the grand home of a wealthy family and now falling steadily into disrepair. Strange events begin to occur, and the question of whether the house is haunted—or whether something else is happening—hangs over the entire story. It is the sort of book that gets under your skin quietly. You read a few chapters, put it down, and then find yourself thinking about the house when you really ought to be thinking about something considerably less sinister. Which, frankly, is half the fun.

Pair with: a dim lamp, rain against the windows, and a firm decision not to investigate that noise upstairs…

5. The Once and Future Witches — Alix E. Harrow

The Once and Future Witches takes us to an alternate 1893, where witchcraft has almost disappeared and the three Eastwood sisters—James Juniper, Agnes Amaranth, and Beatrice Belladonna—find themselves drawn together through the suffragist movement in New Salem. And soon enough, forgotten magic begins to resurface…

Harrow combines folklore, fairy tales, sisterhood, magic, history, and women’s suffrage into a story that feels both old-fashioned and wonderfully unruly. It is much more than a conventional witch story, and its fascination with the relationship between words, stories, and magic makes it particularly appealing to anyone who believes books have always contained a little bit of witchcraft themselves.

Pair with: black tea, candlelight, and something with cinnamon in it. Preferably while wearing something vaguely witchy.

6. Something Wicked This Way Comes — Ray Bradbury

Two boys. A small town. The end of October. And a mysterious carnival that rolls into Green Town after midnight, promising dreams, youth, and wishes fulfilled—at a price. Something Wicked This Way Comes is one of those books that seems to have been waiting specifically for October. Its Pandemonium Shadow Show arrives in town a week before Halloween, and what begins as irresistible temptation gradually becomes something much darker.

Bradbury is particularly good at making childhood feel both magical and frightening, and this novel balances those two things beautifully. It has carnival lights, calliope music, autumn darkness, friendship, temptation, and the uncomfortable realization that getting exactly what you want may not be such a wonderful idea after all!

Pair with: caramel apples, a flashlight, and one very stern instruction not to follow the carnival music.