Bonus: 6 Scary Books for Spooky Season!

Welcome back to Scare Me! a weekly horror newsletter. In this bonus newsletter, I’m sharing some spooky book recs from a fun collaboration I did recently on Instagram.

Do you ever get a DM that just instantly makes you happy?

I started writing this newsletter because I wanted a place to yap about my horror hyperfixation, but also because I was craving community. I’m an introverted remote worker in a rural Washington tourist town—you can see the issues with that.

But six months in, the newsletter is already bringing really fun connections into my life. I’ve done nearly a dozen interviews with some of my favorite voices in horror and mailed out my first zine swap since starting this project. Recently, I got an intriguing DM from a reader interested in collaborating.

Today, I bring you the results of that conversation! Seneca Book Club hosts events and shares book recommendations on their campus and online. We swapped book recommendations for three of our favorite horror subgenres to kick off the Halloween season!

Below, I’ve pulled together our list of favorite spooky reads—but definitely check out the original post over on Instagram! They did a great job weaving in little details from all the books recommended below.

About Seneca Book Club: “Hi! We’re Seneca Book Club (@senecabookclub). We love hosting cozy, cute, and creative events and love to share bookish content to connect readers. We have also started The Bookworms Postcard, the first bookish Snail Mail Club!”

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Folk Horror

Seneca Book Club’s Pick: The Elementals by Michael McDowell 

A Southern Gothic masterpiece that blends family secrets, isolation, and the supernatural. On a desolate Alabama beach, two families confront an abandoned Victorian home half-consumed by sand dunes. Haunting, atmospheric, and criminally underrated.

Michelle’s Pick: Ghost Wall by Sarah Moss

Silvie’s father is obsessed with ancient Britons—specifically the Iron Age. He leaps at the opportunity to join a group of anthropology students on a weekend research trip, dragging Silvie and her mother into the woods to live like their Iron Age ancestors. But the weekend begins to go awry as Silvie increasingly eludes her father’s attempts to control her.

As her father’s quiet rage and fixation on the past become increasingly frightening, Silvie discovers that the ancient woods might offer a path to a different kind of life. This is a tense but subtle story that’s haunted me in the years since I first encountered it. At 130 pages, it’s a perfect book to start and finish within an evening or a weekend.    

Found Footage

Seneca Book Club: House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski 

A cult classic that feels like you’re flipping through cursed found footage in book form. Told through layered narratives and “discovered documents,” it explores a family’s house that’s bigger on the inside than the outside. Disorienting, terrifying, and a true underground gem.

Extra note from me—this is my next read! I took a peek at the first few pages a couple nights ago and was instantly hooked. I have ~70 pages of The Turn of the Screw left before I’ll start reading this one in earnest.

Michelle’s Pick: FantasticLand by Mike Bockoven

When a hurricane devastates the Florida coastline, the hundred or so theme park employees trapped at FantasticLand seem well-positioned to weather the storm. They have enough food and water to survive for at least a month. But as disaster relief crews triage the catastrophe, the park’s survivors enter a struggle that pits social groups against each other—with deadly consequences.

Bockoven brilliantly presents the story as an oral history, with “found” official documents and interviews teasing out its tangled threads. It’s up to you to decide whose version of events you trust, why the social contract broke down so spectacularly, and which truths remain stubbornly in the margins. 

Horror in Translation

Seneca Book Club’s Pick: The Vegetarian by Han Kang

Translated from Korean, this quiet but devastating psychological horror is about a woman’s refusal to eat meat spiraling into obsession, alienation, and bodily transformation. It’s literary, unsettling, and lingers long after reading.

Michelle’s Pick: Coin Locker Babies by Ryu Murakami

Between 1980 and 1990, Japan experienced a tragic series of infant deaths when nearly 200 unwanted babies were abandoned in train station lockers. Murakami (also the author of Audition and In the Miso Soup, among other horror classics) takes up this real-life tragedy with the bold, transgressive storytelling he’s known for.

Hashi and Kiku are both abandoned in coin lockers as infants and taken into the same Catholic orphanage. From there, their lives diverge. Kiku becomes a star athlete specializing in pole vaulting, while Hashi disappears only to later reemerge as a bisexual rock star. Kiku and Hashi’s intertwined stories are filled with unforgettable setpieces: a poisoned Tokyo neighborhood called Toxitown; a humid apartment converted into a crocodile habitat; an underwater cave hiding an apocalyptic biological weapon. It’s a disturbing modern classic told with brash style.   

We’ll be back to our regular schedule bright ‘n early on Thursday!

Scare Me! is a free weekly horror newsletter published every Thursday morning. It’s written by Michelle Delgado, featuring original illustrations by Sam Pugh. You can find the archive of past issues here. If you were sent this by a friend, subscribe to receive more spooky interviews, essays—and maybe even a ghost story or two.