Spooky Reads for Adults

"Bells that ring themselves. Record players that turn on an play music to empty rooms. Ghosts that can climb out of wardrobes... Maggie Holt doesn't believe in these things, even though they are the details of the story that made her family famous. Twenty-five years ago, she and her parents, Ewan and Jess, moved to Baneberry Hall, a rambling Victorian estate in the Vermont woods. They spent twenty days there before fleeing in the dead of night, an...

"I very much need to be dead." These are the chilling words left behind by a man who had everything to live for|but took his own life. In the aftermath, his widow, Jane Hawk, does what all her grief, fear, and fury demand: find the truth, no matter what. People of talent and accomplishment, people admired and happy and sound of mind, have been committing suicide in surprising numbers. When Jane seeks to learn why, she becomes the most-wanted fugitive...

Once the center of madness, suicide, mass murder, and whispers of things far worse, the 1800s Gilded Age palace known as the Pendleton, has been re-christened in the 1970s as a luxury apartment building. But now inexplicable shadows caper across walls, security cameras relay impossible images, phantom voices mutter in strange tongues, not-quite-human figures lurk in the basement, and elevators plunge into unknown depths.

An account of the decade-long conflict between humankind and hordes of the predatory undead is told from the perspective of dozens of survivors who describe in their own words the epic human battle for survival.

"An unspeakable crime. A confounding investigation. At a time when the King brand has never been stronger, he has delivered one of his most unsettling and compulsively readable stories"-- "An unspeakable crime. A confounding investigation. At a time when the King brand has never been stronger, he has delivered one of his most unsettling and compulsively readable stories. An eleven-year-old boy's violated corpse is found in a town park. Eyewitnesses...

Kindly, respected Dr. Henry Jekyll is convinced that all men have two personalities lurking within them. He concocts a drug to separate one man into two personalities and tests it on himself. Enter Mr. Hyde--Jekyll's murderous alter ego--as depraved and vicious as Jekyll is virtuous and kindly. Robert Louis Stevenson's shocking thriller explores the battle between good and evil within ourselves. Can Jekyll overcome Hyde--or will he become Hyde's next...

After 90% of the population of the U.S. is wiped out by a man-made plague, the survivors gradually gather into two communities, one in Boulder, Colorado, led by a saintly 108-year-old black woman, Mother Abagail, and the other in Las Vegas (where else?) under a demonic figure, Randall Flagg, "the man with no face." In the ensuing confrontation between good and evil, good triumphs--for the moment.

"The town of Bentley holds two things dear: its football, and its secrets. But when star quarterback Dylan Whitley goes missing, an unremitting fear grips this remote corner of Texas. Joel Whitley was shamed out of conservative Bentley ten years ago, and while he’s finally made a life for himself as a gay man in New York, his younger brother’s disappearance soon brings him back to a place he thought he’d escaped for good. Meanwhile, Sheriff’s...

"June Branch visits her boyfriend, Liam, on Brody Island for a relaxing last weekend of summer. After an escaped group of criminals breaks into the house that June and Liam are watching, Liam is taken by them. June grabs a strange Viking axe and flees from the intruders. When one of the attackers finds her, she swings the axe and takes off his head, which rolls away and begins to babble in terror. For June to uncover the truth, she'll need to hear...

"An eerie debut about a little boy who recovers from a mysterious global flu that's killed thousands and inherits an imaginary friend who makes him do violent things... Kids have imaginary friends. Rachel knows this. So when her young son, Billy, miraculously recovers from a horrible flu that has proven fatal for many, she thinks nothing of Delfy, his new invisible friend. After all, her family is healthy and that's all that matters. But soon Delfy...