7 terrifying books to read on Halloween

When your family business is creating an immersive horror experience for kids and adults every Halloween, seeing monsters on a daily business comes as no surprise. But what if the monsters you see aren’t the hired actors? Noah Turner’s relatives caught glimpses of something unexplainable before but refused to acknowledge it. Unlike them, Noah chooses to let monsters in.

It’s not a horror story as such but rather an unpredictable, curious and twisted story full of allegories, non-linear scenes, paranormal moments and psychological trauma.

On a train, Ella Longfield overhears two young men flirting with teenage girls. The next day she wakes up to the news that one of the girls – beautiful Anna Ballard – has gone missing.

A year later, Anna is still missing and Ella feels really guilty. But apparently, she’s not the only one who had noticed the girls and the men on a train because now she’s receiving threatening letters that make her fear for her life.

Someone knows where Anna is and they’re not telling. But they are watching Ella.

A chilling, dark and totally absorbing novel that will ruin your fragile mind forever.

Just like the scariest plots out there, this one involves secret government experiments to unlock hidden abilities in the human mind. This time – through extreme sensory deprivation.

So far, all the experiments have failed and the test subjects went violently insane. Until one day the experiment is perfected. Or… almost perfected.

No loud Boo! is ever as scary as a quiet whisper outside your window…

Tom Kennedy and his young son Jake move into a new town after the sudden death of Tom’s wife. What they don’t know about their new home yet is that 20 years earlier a serial killer, named The Whisper Man, murdered five people here, luring them out of the safety of their own houses by whispering at the windows at night. The killer was caught and the story almost forgotten, until Jake starts hearing whispers by his window.

If you have a soft spot for books with complicated characters and satisfying endings, this one is for you!

Newly engaged Adam and Meryam lead an expedition to Ararat mountain in Turkey where what is believed to be Noah’s Ark has recently been discovered. A massive blizzard traps them inside the mountain where an ancient boat is located. They continue the expedition and discover a mysterious coffin with an ugly, misshapen cadaver inside, the strangest things begin to happen. Suddenly, they’re no longer alone. Something unknown is definitely lurking around.

Following the tradition of the best psychological horror stories, Bird Box proves that what remains unseen can often be far more terrifying than what can be seen. As readers, we aren’t even given a proper description of the creatures who terrorise the world. It’s the suspense, the wait, the sounds and the shadows that drive the heroes and the readers crazy.

Five years ago, people started to see… something. Something unexplainable, something that drives them mad and often leads to suicides and homicides. Blackened windows and full isolation is the reality the world lives in now.

And Malorie hopes to escape this reality. She has trained her young children to live wearing blindfolds and to only rely on hearing to survive. Now it’s time to go.

“…the very act of breaking the skin, of entering another human body, intrigued and excited me. I could see why people might kill for that sensation…”

The fans of Patrick Suskind’s Perfume should definitely add this book to their must-read list. The sensation of observing the world through the eyes of a psychopath, who justifies his own horrific maniacal tendencies with the need to explore things ‘scientifically’ is definitely a familiar trope.

Here, the narrator is fascinated by a Persian myth in which newborn kids were placed in a palace, attended only by mutes, to see whether language is innate or acquired. So, he decides to conduct his own experiment.