Library showcase: Halloween Tales!

Source: Pixabay

Fall is here and with Halloween just around the corner, there’s never been a better time to discover all that the library has to offer on vampires, monsters, ghouls, and other things that go bump in the night! If you’re looking for a ghost story or two, who better to turn to than Edgar Allan Poe, a former Virginian who once attended the University of Virginia. Check out The Tales of Edgar Allan Poe or The Illustrated Edgar Allan Poe to read some of Poe’s classic creepy tales.

Possibly the two most famous scary stories of all time, Frankenstein by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley and Dracula by Bram Stoker, have inspired dozens of movies, stories, and plays over the years. Another famous thriller is The Phantom of the Opera by Gaston Leroux, which was adapted into the celebrated Broadway show of the same name. If you’re already familiar with these, try some other spooky classics, such as Ray Bradbury’s Something Wicked This Way Comes or Stephen King’s Just after Sunset.

Vampires have enjoyed a lot of popularity in recent fiction, mostly due to Stephanie Meyer’s Twilight series, but there's also Dead until Dark by Charlaine Harris, the novel that inspired the HBO show, True Blood, and Pandora: New Tales of the Vampires by Anne Rice, author of Interview with the Vampire. For more books sure to provide a little Halloween spirit, check out Coraline or The Graveyard Book by Neil Gaiman, Monster by Frank Peretti, or The Monstrumologist by Rich Yancey.

We also have a great collection of nonfiction books on Halloween-worthy topics. Try Classics of the Horror Film by William K. Everson for a well-researched and enjoyable history of the horror film genre, or In Search of Dracula by Raymond T. McNally and Radu Florescu to follow the myth of vampires back through European history and folklore. Hoping to witness a paranormal event this Halloween? Get ready by reading about ghostly phenomena in The Spirit Book by Raymond Buckland or Real-life X-Files: Investigating the Paranormal by Joe Nickell.

Anyone looking for an extra dose of terror this Halloween might enjoy World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War by Max Brooks, or the terrifying trilogy Ring, Spiral, and Loop by Koji Suzuki. Whether you see Halloween as a time to relish something truly frightful or simply enjoy the autumn colors and a hot pumpkin spice latte, you can always find something to read at the library.