Welcome to Spooky Reads Friday, where every Friday in the month of October, I will be giving you scary selection book recommendations that will make your weekend reading more fulfilling…and scary 🎃. Check out these haunting book recs…if you dare…
The Monsters of Rookhaven by Padraig Kenny
Sometimes the monsters take us. Sometimes we become the monsters.
Mirabelle has always known she is a monster. When the glamour protecting her unusual family from the human world is torn and an orphaned brother and sister stumble upon Rookhaven, Mirabelle soon discovers that friendship can be found in the outside world.
But as something far more sinister comes to threaten them all, it quickly becomes clear that the true monsters aren’t necessarily the ones you can see. (Credit: Pan Macmillan )
Amari and the Night Brothers by B.B. Alston
Amari Peters knows three things.
Her big brother Quinton has gone missing.
No one will talk about it.
His mysterious job holds the secret…
So when Amari gets an invitation to the Bureau of Supernatural Affairs, she’s certain this is her chance to find Quinton. But first she has to get her head around the new world of the Bureau, where mermaids, aliens and magicians are real, and her roommate is a weredragon.
Amari must compete against kids who’ve known about the supernatural world their whole lives, and when each trainee is awarded a special supernatural talent, Amari is given an illegal talent – one that the Bureau views as dangerous.
With an evil magician threatening the whole supernatural world, and her own classmates thinking she is the enemy, Amari has never felt more alone. But if she doesn’t pass the three tryouts, she may never find out what happened to Quinton … (Credit: HarperCollins Publisher)
Hold Back the Tide by Melinda Salisbury
Everyone knows what happened to Alva’s mother, all those years ago. But when dark forces begin to stir in Ormscaula, Alva has to face a very different future – and question everything she thought she knew about her past…
Unsettling, sharply beautiful and thought-provoking, Hold Back the Tide is the new novel from Melinda Salisbury, bestselling author of The Sin Eater’s Daughter trilogy. (Credit: Scholastic)
Japanese Ghost Stories by Lafcadio Hearn
The dead wreak revenge on the living, paintings come alive, spectral brides possess mortal men and a priest devours human flesh in these chilling Japanese ghost stories retold by a master of the supernatural. Lafcadio Hearn drew on the phantoms and ghouls of traditional Japanese folklore – including the headless ‘rokuro-kubi’, the monstrous goblins ‘jikininki’ or the faceless ‘mujina’ who stalk lonely neighbourhoods – and infused them with his own memories of his haunted childhood in nineteenth-century Ireland to create these terrifying tales of striking and eerie power. Today they are regarded in Japan as classics in their own right. (Credit: Penguin Classics)
Family Tree Vol. 1: Sapling by Jeff Lemire
When an eight-year-old girl literally begins to transform into a tree, her single Mom, troubled brother and possibly insane Grandfather embark on a bizarre, and heart-wrenching odyssey across the back roads of America desperately searching for a way to cure her horrifying transformation before it’s too late.
But the further they get from home, and the closer the girl gets to completely losing her humanity, the more external forces threaten to tear the family apart as fanatical cults, mercenaries and tabloid Paparazzi close in. determined to destroy the girl or use her for themselves. (Credit: Image Comics)