Halloween Resources for Fun and Research

Sethe was born a slave and escaped to Ohio, but eighteen years later she is still not free. Sethe has too many memories of Sweet Home, the beautiful farm where so many hideous things happened. And Sethe's new home is haunted by the ghost of her baby, who died nameless and whose tombstone is engraved with a single word: Beloved.

Mary Shelley's seminal novel of the scientist whose creation becomes a monster. This edition is the original 1818 text, which preserves the hard-hitting and politically charged aspects of Shelley's original writing, as well as her unflinching wit and strong female voice. This edition also includes a new introduction and suggestions for further reading.

Seven years have passed since Dr. Hannibal Lecter escaped from custody, seven years since FBI Special Agent Clarice Starling interviewed him in a maximum security hospital for the criminally insane. The doctor is still at large, pursuing his own ineffable interests, savoring the scents, the essences of an unguarded world. But Starling has never forgotten her encounters with Dr. Lecter, and the metallic rasp of his seldom-used voice still sounds in her dreams. Powerful, hypnotic, utterly original, Hannibal is a dazzling feast for the imagination. Prepare to travel to hell and beyond as a master storyteller permanently alters the world you thought you knew.

Robert Neville may well be the last living man on Earth . . . but he is not alone.   An incurable plague has mutated every other man, woman, and child into bloodthirsty, nocturnal creatures who are determined to destroy him.   By day, he is a hunter, stalking the infected monstrosities through the abandoned ruins of civilization. By night, he barricades himself in his home and prays for dawn....

Here are the confessions of a vampire. Hypnotic, shocking, and chillingly sensual, this is a novel of mesmerizing beauty and astonishing force—a story of danger and flight, of love and loss, of suspense and resolution, and of the extraordinary power of the senses.

Amity Island's Police Chief Brody, a young ichthyologist, and a life and a colorful shark fisherman are allied in a life and death struggle to destroy a killer shark.

Novelist Paul Sheldon has plans to make the difficult transition from writing historical romances featuring heroine Misery Chastain to publishing literary fiction. Annie Wilkes, Sheldon's number one fan, rescues the author from the scene of a car accident. The former nurse takes care of him in her remote house, but becomes irate when she discovers that the author has killed Misery off in his latest book. Annie keeps Sheldon prisoner while forcing him to write a book that brings Misery back to life.

When the Creeds move into a beautiful old house in rural Maine, it all seems too good to be true: physician father, beautiful wife, charming little daughter, adorable infant son -- and now an idyllic home. As a family, they've got it all...right down to the friendly cat. But the nearby woods hide a blood-chilling truth -- more terrifying than death itself...and hideously more powerful.

The story involves a writer named Ben Mears who returns to the town of Jerusalem's Lot in Maine, where he lived from the age of five through nine, only to discover that the residents are becoming vampires.

Few American novels written this century have endured in th heart and mind as has this one-Ray Bradbury's incomparable masterwork of the dark fantastic. A carnival rolls in sometime after the midnight hour on a chill Midwestern October eve, ushering in Halloween a week before its time. A calliope's shrill siren song beckons to all with a seductive promise of dreams and youth regained. In this season of dying, Cooger & Dark's Pandemonium Shadow Show has come to Green Town, Illinois, to destroy every life touched by its strange and sinister mystery. And two inquisitive boys standing precariously on the brink of adulthood will soon discover the secret of the satanic raree-show's smoke, mazes, and mirrors, as they learn all too well the heavy cost of wishes -- and the stuff of nightmare.

After Paul D. finds his old slave friend Sethe in Ohio and moves in with her and her daughter Denver, a strange girl comes along by the name of "Beloved". Sethe and Denver take her in and then strange things start to happen.

Boris Karloff stars as the screen's most memorable monster in what many consider to be the greatest horror film ever made. Dr. Frankenstein (Colin Clive) dares to tamper with life and death by creating a human monster (Boris Karloff) out of lifeless body parts. It's director James Whale's adaptation of the Mary Shelley novel blended with Karloff's compassionate portrayal of a creature groping for identity that makes Frankenstein a masterpiece not only of the genre, but for all time.

One of Dr. Hannibal Lecter's surviving victims is poised to enact sweet revenge on the world's most feared cannibal. FBI agent Clarice Starling is brought back on the case when Lecter decides to come out of retirement to face his adversary.

Robert Neville is the last human survivor in what is left of New York City. A pandemic has left only 1% of the population alive and most of those who survived are no longer human. The infected, now lurking in the shadows, watch Neville's every move. Perhaps mankind's last, best hope, Neville is driven by the only one remaining mission: to find a way to reverse the effects of the virus using his own immune blood.

A vampire with a conscience, Lestat (Cruise), tells the story of how he lured a young aristocrat (Pitt) into the immortality of the damned.

A man-eating shark causes havoc off the Long Island coast and three men join together to hunt and destroy it.

After an almost fatal car crash, novelist Paul Sheldon finds himself being nursed by a deranged fan who holds him captive.

Based on the seminal horror novel by Stephen King, Pet Sematary follows Dr. Louis Creed, who, after relocating with his wife Rachel and their two young children from Boston to rural Maine, discovers a mysterious burial ground hidden deep in the woods near the family's new home. When tragedy strikes, Louis turns to his unusual neighbor, Jud Crandall, setting off a perilous chain reaction that unleashes an unfathomable evil with horrific consequences.

Into the sleepy little hamlet of Salem's Lot comes a stranger who unleashes an insidious evil so devastating it threatens to destroy the entire town and everyone in it. Ben Mears, a young novelist, returns home to Salem's Lot, determined to write a book about the eerie old Marsten House which overlooks the town. It is Mears' conviction that the source of all the trouble is the house itself, which he believes attracts evil to it. With the help of his old schoolmaster and a courageous teenager, he unravels the deadly plague that is claiming the lives and souls of the townspeople of Salem's Lot.

Terrible things happen when Mr. Dark and his Pandemonium Carnival come to town.

Now an HBO® Series from J.J. Abrams (Executive Producer of Westworld), Misha Green (Creator of Underground) and Jordan Peele (Director of Get Out) The critically acclaimed cult novelist makes visceral the terrors of life in Jim Crow America and its lingering effects in this brilliant and wondrous work of the imagination that melds historical fiction, pulp noir, and Lovecraftian horror and fantasy. Chicago, 1954. When his father Montrose goes missing, 22-year-old Army veteran Atticus Turner embarks on a road trip to New England to find him, accompanied by his Uncle George--publisher of The Safe Negro Travel Guide--and his childhood friend Letitia. On their journey to the manor of Mr. Braithwhite--heir to the estate that owned one of Atticus's ancestors--they encounter both mundane terrors of white America and malevolent spirits that seem straight out of the weird tales George devours. At the manor, Atticus discovers his father in chains, held prisoner by a secret cabal named the Order of the Ancient Dawn--led by Samuel Braithwhite and his son Caleb--which has gathered to orchestrate a ritual that shockingly centers on Atticus. And his one hope of salvation may be the seed of his--and the whole Turner clan's--destruction. A chimerical blend of magic, power, hope, and freedom that stretches across time, touching diverse members of two black families, Lovecraft Country is a devastating kaleidoscopic portrait of racism--the terrifying specter that continues to haunt us today.

NOS4A2 follows Victoria "Vic" McQueen, a young working-class artist who discovers that she has a supernatural ability to track the seemingly immortal Charlie Manx. Manx feeds on the souls of children, then deposits what remains of them into Christmasland—a twisted Christmas Village of Manx's imagination where every day is Christmas Day and unhappiness is against the law. Vic must strive to defeat Manx and rescue his victims—without losing her mind or falling victim to him herself.

In this Library of America volume Joyce Carol Oates, our leading practitioner of the contemporary Gothic, presents the essential works of Shirley Jackson, the novels and stories that, from the early 1940s through the mid-1960s, wittily remade the genre of psychological horror for an alienated, postwar America. She opens with The Lottery (1949), Jackson's only collection of short fiction, whose disquieting title story-one of the most widely anthologized tales of the 20th century-has entered American folklore. Also among these early works are "The Daemon Lover," a story Oates praises as "deeper, more mysterious, and more disturbing than 'The Lottery,' " and "Charles," the hilarious sketch that launched Jackson's secondary career as a domestic humorist. Here too are Jackson's masterly short novels: The Haunting of Hill House (1959), the tale of an achingly empathetic young woman chosen by a haunted house to be its new tenant, and We Have Always Lived in the Castle (1962), the unrepentant confessions of Miss Merricat Blackwood, a cunning adolescent who has gone to quite unusual lengths to preserve her ideal of family happiness. Rounding out the volume are 21 other stories and sketches that showcase Jackson in all her many modes, and the essay "Biography of a Story," Jackson's acidly funny account of the public reception of "The Lottery," which provoked more mail from readers of The New Yorker than any contribution before or since.

An epic battle for survival begins between man and vampire in The Strain--the first book in a heart-stopping trilogy from one of Hollywood's most inventive storytellers and a critically acclaimed thriller writer. Guillermo del Toro, the genius director of the Academy Award-winning Pan's Labyrinth and Hellboy, and Hammett Award-winning author Chuck Hogan have joined forces to boldly reinvent the vampire novel. Brilliant, blood-chilling, and unputdownable, The Strain is a nightmare of the first order.

Originally appearing in serial format just before the turn of the twentieth century, The Turn of the Screw is considered a classic of Gothic fiction. Critically acclaimed for its ability to create a sense of confusion and an atmosphere of suspense in the reader, the story focuses on a governess caring for two children at a remote country estate who becomes convinced that the grounds are haunted. This Norton Critical Edition includes the New York Edition text of the novel (the one that had James's final authority) newly and fully annotated by Jonathan Warren, and revised and expanded contextual materials.