October is finally here! The nights are getting longer, and there’s no better time to curl up with a good book… even one that makes you double check the locks on the house before you fall asleep! Horror and the supernatural have been keeping readers awake for centuries, and the stories that have lasted are the ones that tap into fears we all share – the unknown, the monster within and the things that go bump in the night. In honor of Halloween (commonly considered, by me, the best holiday in the year), we’re counting down five of the spookiest works of fiction ever written, spanning more than 150 years of shivers. Read them with the lights on… or don’t!

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Frankenstein by Mary Shelley (1818)
Mary Shelley was literally a teenager when she dreamed up the story of an ambitious scientist and the creature he brings to life, during a famously gloomy summer spent with friends and a ghost story writing competition between them. It’s part horror, part tragedy and a haunting warning about ambition run amok. More than two centuries later, Frankenstein has never been out of print and its imagery is so woven into our culture that nearly everyone knows the story, even those who have never read it. Not bad for a tale that was stitched together on a dare!

Tales of Mystery and Imagination by Edgar Allan Poe (1840s)
No list of spooky literature would be complete without Poe, the master of the macabre. Stories like “The Tell-Tale Heart,” “The Fall of the House of Usher” and “The Black Cat” explore Poe’s common themes of guilt, madness and dread in just a few (unforgettable) pages. Poe’s work has been in print since his own lifetime as well, and it’s still a staple of classrooms and Halloween reading lists everywhere. Nevermore will October feel complete without him! (Too much of a pun? Oh well!)

Dracula by Bram Stoker (1897)
Told through letters, diary entries and newspaper clippings, Stoker’s Gothic masterpiece introduces us to Count Dracula, the aristocratic vampire who set the template for nearly every bloodsucker to follow. It was a hit in its day, but its real staying power came later, through what seem like endless stage and film adaptations. Dracula remains the gold standard of vampire fiction, and the Count still shows up each Halloween, always ready to sink his teeth into a new generation of readers. (Are these jokes getting to be too much yet?)

The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson (1959)
Our favorite Mistress of Terror Shirley Jackson’s novel follows a small group of people invited to investigate a notoriously haunted mansion, and the true horror lies in what the house does to the mind. It is often considered one of the finest “haunted house” stories ever written, and it has influenced generations of authors since its publication. Its popularity has held steady for over six decades, and a recent television adaptation (even though we be book people here, we actually can recommend it, though not to those of the faint of heart!) introduced it to a whole new audience!

The Shining by Stephen King (1977)
Our most modern author Stephen King’s chilling tale of a struggling writer, his family and an isolated hotel with a sinister past made King a household name in the world of horror. Between the bestselling novel and Stanley Kubrick’s iconic film adaptation, The Shining has literally become part of our cultural landscape. Nearly fifty years on, readers are still checking in to the Overlook! 

Honorable Mentions (because a good scare deserves a second look):

The Turn of the Screw by Henry James (readers have argued for over a century about whether the ghosts are real or imagined… we vote real)
The Castle of Otranto by Horace Walpole (published in 1764, it’s widely considered the very first Gothic novel)
Rosemary’s Baby by Ira Levin (a bestseller so unsettling it may make you think twice about meeting the neighbors)

From monsters to vampires, from Gothic castles to haunted hotels, these stories prove that a good scare never goes out of style. So dim the lights, pour something warm and happy reading… if you dare!

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Today marks 121 years since George MacDonald – the Scottish minister, fantasy pioneer and secret weapon behind some of your favorite authors – passed away in 1905. We know he influenced the story of Alice in Wonderland and even helped shape C.S. Lewis’s imagination, but his life was full of stranger, funnier and even more surprising details than some versions suggest. In honor of his death day, we include some of our curious favorites!

A Childhood Allergic to Art

MacDonald grew up in a strict Calvinist household in Scotland where art wasn’t just discouraged… it was literally suspect. His grandmother reportedly tossed her own son’s violin into the fire for being “idolatrous” and his father once took a Sir Walter Scott novel away from young George. All of this might not be a crime, but it is not exactly the household you’d expect to produce one of the founding fathers of fantasy literature.

An Ousted Preacher

Once he “took orders” as a congregational minister, George MacDonald couldn’t quite even out the doctrine of eternal damnation with the God he believed in. His sermons eventually leaned so unorthodox that his congregations pushed him out of formal ministry… a career-ending move that, in hindsight, freed him up to write some of the most beloved fantasy of the 19th century, but at the moment felt like a massive blow to the author. 

He Turned Down a Life in the Big Apple

Financial security was never really MacDonald’s thing. This may or may not be true, but he was reportedly offered an immense (for the time) $20,000 a year salary to pastor a prestigious Fifth Avenue church in New York. Wildly for the time, MacDonald said no, choosing his own path over a paycheck.

The OG Alice Enthusiast

Lewis Carroll (or Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, his real name) might never have published Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland if not for MacDonald. Carroll shared the manuscript with MacDonald’s own children first, and their rather enthusiastic reaction is what convinced Carroll (Dodgson) that it was worth putting into the world. Without MacDonald, we would have one significantly less childhood memory!

Bonus Fact: MacDonald as a Mentor Through the Ages

C.S. Lewis, author of the Chronicles of Narnia (among other things), called MacDonald his master and said that reading MacDonald’s Phantastes felt like crossing “a great frontier.” The admiration for his “master” ran so deep that Lewis wrote MacDonald himself as a character (a guide in the afterlife) in his novel The Great Divorce.

Honestly? These stories seem not so bad for a preacher’s child whose family once literally burned a violin for being too fun! Today we honor MacDonald, and the interesting parts of his life that we rarely get to read about.

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Today marks the anniversary of Edith Wharton’s death, so it feels like the right moment to sit with two of her biggest works and see what they say to each other and about the world Wharton experienced while writing each! The House of Mirth (published in 1905) and The Age of Innocence (published in 1920) sit fifteen years apart, and between their publications Wharton lived through a world war, a divorce and a permanent move abroad. All of which you can feel in how differently she handles nearly the same material… the second time around.

Both The House of Mirth and The Age of Innocence watch their characters get slowly and quietly crushed by unwritten rules of old New York society, but the angle of attack actually changes quite a lot. The House of Mirth follows Lily Bart, a woman with (basically) no real power in her world, just trying to marry well enough to survive. The book is relentless about it too, almost claustrophobic – tightening around her chapter by chapter until there’s nowhere left for her to go. The Age of Innocence flips that setup. It centers on Newland Archer, a man who actually does hold both power and status, and yet still manages to talk himself into choosing the safe expected path over the woman he loves. The tone is cooler when describing Archer’s choices, more melancholic than the desperateness of Lily Bart’s search. Wharton wasn’t watching someone drown this time… instead it felt as though she was watching someone quietly shut a door on his own life and then spend decades wondering about it.

That shift in stakes truly changes the moral of each story, too. House of Mirth reads almost like a classical tragedy – Lily gets unraveled by a society that offers women almost no legitimate way to exist outside of marriage, and the novel comes across as a pretty direct attack on that system with very little room for hope. The Age of Innocence feels different because Wharton wrote it after watching that same world start to erode. It plays more like an elegy than an attack, almost mourning the same inflexibility it’s simultaneously critiquing. Fifteen years on and Wharton hadn’t softened her view and critiques of “society”. She’d just grown more interested in what it costs on both sides, what it destroys… and what it somehow, even imperfectly, holds together. On a day like today (the 89th anniversary of her death), it feels like a fitting way to remember her as not just a narrator of a vanished world, but as a writer who never stopped asking what our worlds actually cost the people living in them.

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June 10th marks the anniversary of the death of one of America’s most beloved storytellers. And if you’ve ever found yourself totally lost in a frontier tale with dust on your boots and a six-shooter in your hand (figuratively speaking, we hope), you already know why we’re here. Louis L’Amour was the king of the Western novel, and he left behind a legacy so deeply woven into American literature that a single blog post could barely scratch the surface… yet we are going to give it a shot!

L’Amour was born Louis Dearborn LaMoore on March 22, 1908, in Jamestown, North Dakota. He left school at fifteen and spent his early years doing pretty much everything a restless young man could get into… he worked as a longshoreman, a lumberjack, a cattle skinner, an elephant handler, and even a professional boxer with an impressive 51 wins to his name (the man really couldn’t sit still, clearly). He served in the U.S. Army during World War II and traveled all over the world, soaking up experiences that he would later pour straight onto his pages. 

That being said, getting published wasn’t an overnight accomplishment for L’Amour. He spent actual years grinding away at pulp magazines in the 1940s before landing his first novel, “Westward the Tide” (1950). The real turning point came with “Hondo” (1953), which got turned into a John Wayne film the same year (which was not a half bad debut). He never really slowed down after that, putting out fan favorites like “The Sackett Brand” (1965) and “Bendigo Shafter” (1979), and eventually over 100 books total, selling more than 330 million copies worldwide. He embraced a role as a storyteller for everyday readers with genuine enthusiasm… famously saying he wrote for the people who didn’t typically read. A statement which is perhaps the most generous artistic mission a writer could have!

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L’Amour’s footprints could be found all over the Western literary genre, and plenty of authors (like Elmer Kelton and Ralph Cotton) have pointed to his lean storytelling style and morally grounded characters as a major influence on their own works. His work truly helped shape how we think about the American frontier in fiction and film, and he was recognized for it in a big way with both the Congressional Gold Medal (in 1983) and the Presidential Medal of Freedom (in 1984). He passed away in Los Angeles on June 10th, 1988 after a battle with lung cancer, at 80 years old. He left behind more stories than many writers can dream up in two lifetimes… and honestly? We’re still not done reading them! 

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If you were to somehow invent a life perfectly suited for Gothic fiction, it would be hard for you to find one better than the one Daphne du Maurier actually lived. Born on May 13th, 1907 in London, she grew up in a family of artists and performers, spent her most formative years falling deeply in love with the wild coastline of Cornwall. She then went on to write some of the most atmospheric novels in the English language. Happy birthday, Daphne. We are still not over Manderley.

Du Maurier’s relationship with Cornwall was probably the defining love affair of her life, arguably more consuming than any human one. She first visited the area as a teenager and was immediately captivated, describing it later as a feeling of having come home to a place she had never been. She eventually leased Menabilly, a crumbling and at the time largely forgotten manor house near Fowey, and lived there for over twenty years. Menabilly became Manderley, the brooding, unforgettable estate at the heart of Rebecca, her novel published in 1938. That novel’s opening line, “Last night I dreamt I was at Manderley again,” is one of the most recognizable first lines in all of English literature, and the house that inspired it was every bit as atmospheric and secretive as its fictional counterpart! Cornwall itself almost acts as a living character in Du Maurier’s novels… from the smuggler’s landscapes of Jamaica Inn (published in 1936) to the weirdly claustrophobic coastal settings of My Cousin Rachel (published in 1951).

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And yet, for much of Du Maurier’s career… the literary establishment could apparently not quite bring itself to take her seriously. Critics often categorized her as simply a “romance writer”, a label that followed her stubbornly, despite the complex psychological nuance in her work and the genuine menace running through her best books. Rebecca is many things… but a simple romance novel it is not! Du Maurier herself seems to have found the dismissal frustrating and confusing, and (thank goodness) history has sided firmly with her on this matter. She is now widely considered a master of suspense and atmosphere, and was even cited as an influence by writers like Stephen King! Her books have remained continuously in print decades after her death in 1989. The establishment eventually came around… it only took them the better part of a century (no rush, gentlemen!)

Today, Cornwall celebrates her legacy with an annual Du Maurier Festival of Arts and Literature held in Fowey each spring – drawing readers, writers, Du Maurier fans and literary pilgrims from around the world. First editions of her novels, especially Rebecca and Jamaica Inn, are genuinely prized in our cozy antiquarian book world. For a genuinely wonderful writer once dismissed as lightweight… Du Maurier’s legacy has turned out to be remarkably (and deservedly) significant. Happy Birthday to Daphne Du Maurier!

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As April ends and May Day waits just around the corner, there is one night that stands apart from the rest – electric, ancient and just a teensy bit eerie. Walpurgis Night, traditionally observed on the eve of April 30th into the morning of May 1st, has been sending shivers down European spines for centuries. And as it turns out… some of literature’s greatest minds couldn’t resist its draw either!

The origins of Walpurgis Night are a somewhat fascinating tangle of pagan tradition mixed with the Christian calendar. The night gets its name from Saint Walpurga, an English missionary nun whose feast day falls on May 1st – but the celebrations themselves reach back way further, with their roots in ancient Germanic and Celtic spring festivals designed to welcome warmer months (and ward off evil spirits, of course). Bonfires have been lit across hillsides from Scandinavia to Central Europe, noise was made, herbs were burned and communities gathered to keep the darkness at bay during what was believed to be one of the nights when the boundary between the living world and the spirit world grew dangerously thin. Similarly to how the day of Samhain (Halloween) was thought of, witches were said to ride to a mountain in Germany for a grand holiday, and protective charms were hung on both doors and livestock alike. It was, in short, not a night you’d want to spend wandering alone down a dark road… which brings us to how this holiday has been seen in literature.

Few authors have written about Walpurgis Night as masterfully as Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, in the epic drama Faust… which features a pretty gloriously chaotic Walpurgis Night scene in Part One – complete with witches, devils and enough general mayhem to make even Mephistopheles blush. Bram Stoker, never one to miss a good omen, placed his hapless Jonathan Harker in Transylvania on Walpurgis Night in Dracula. Harker specifically even notes the date in his journal with dread, unaware that his host has quite a bit more in common with the evening’s traditions than he originally lets on!

The good news is that Walpurgis Night is alive and well today, celebrated with happy enthusiasm across Scandinavia and Germany. In Sweden it is known as Valborg and marked with massive bonfires, student celebrations and a ceremonial welcoming of spring. In Germany, towns still light fires on Brocken mountain (where the witches were said to fly to). The holiday may have shed much of its supernatural menace but has luckily kept a hold on all of its atmosphere… which (much like a well-loved first edition book) is really the whole point! Happy Walpurgis Night!