I’ve been reading so many good books lately! Lots of thrillers and some contemporary, memoirs, and romance. I recently started Cold Eternity, S.A. Barnes, which is a sci-fi with paranormal elements. It’s making me really crave more spooky books despite not being Fall or Halloween season. So here are a few of my recs for “Spooky Spring”!
Witchcraft for Wayward Girls, Grady Hendrix
Late night skinny dipping, dancing naked in the forest, and deadly rainstorms? This book is the perfect spooky spring read. It’s magical and heartbreaking and just a little bit frightening.
They call them wayward girls. Loose girls. Girls who grew up too fast. And they’re sent to the Wellwood Home in St. Augustine, Florida, where unwed mothers are hidden by their families to have their babies in secret, give them up for adoption, and most important of all, to forget any of it ever happened. Fifteen-year-old Fern arrives at the home in the sweltering summer of 1970, pregnant, terrified and alone.
Everything the girls eat, every moment of their waking day, and everything they’re allowed to talk about is strictly controlled by adults who claim they know what’s best for them. Then Fern meets a librarian who gives her an occult book about witchcraft, and power is in the hands of the girls for the first time in their lives. But power can destroy as easily as it creates, and it’s never given freely. There’s always a price to be paid…and it’s usually paid in blood.
A House With Good Bones, T. Kingfisher
Have you been out cleaning up your yard this spring? Maybe prepping your garden, pulling weeds, or trimming your rose bushes? What if you realized that a family member had been stashing jars of teeth beneath those rose bushes? Creepy, right? That’s exactly what will have you scratching your head in this perfect spooky spring read.
Sam’s excited for this rare extended visit with her mom, despite her brother’s warning that “mom seems off” lately. But stepping inside the house, she quickly realizes home isn’t what it used to be. Gone is the warm, cluttered charm her mom is known for; now the walls are painted a sterile white. Her mom jumps at the smallest noises and looks over her shoulder even when she’s the only person in the room. And when Sam steps out back to clear her head, she finds a jar of teeth hidden beneath the magazine-worthy rose bushes, and vultures are circling the garden from above.
Wilder Girls, Rory Power
A mysterious and fatal epidemic, a remote location, grotesquely deformed animals in the forest…. it doesn’t get more spooky spring than this! This is like academia horror and isolation horror all rolled into one. It’s YA but does get it a bit dark at times. I’d love to see Power write a sequel to this one!
It’s been eighteen months since the Raxter School for Girls was put under quarantine. Since the Tox hit and pulled Hetty’s life out from under her.
It started slow. First the teachers died one by one. Then it began to infect the students, turning their bodies strange and foreign. Now, cut off from the rest of the world and left to fend for themselves on their island home, the girls don’t dare wander outside the school’s fence, where the Tox has made the woods wild and dangerous. They wait for the cure they were promised as the Tox seeps into everything.
Black Sheep, Rachel Harrison
A family wedding brings staunchly religious and toxic family members back together again. The result is total meltdown on a sinister level. This is a quick read with a devilish plot.
Nobody has a “normal” family, but Vesper Wright’s is truly…something else. Vesper left home at eighteen and never looked back—mostly because she was told that leaving the staunchly religious community she grew up in meant she couldn’t return. But then an envelope arrives on her doorstep.
Inside is an invitation to the wedding of Vesper’s beloved cousin Rosie. When Vesper’s homecoming exhumes a terrifying secret, she’s forced to reckon with her family’s beliefs and her own crisis of faith in this deliciously sinister novel that explores the way family ties can bind us as we struggle to find our place in the world.
Do you read spooky books year round or only at Halloween time?
