Thread: Halloween themed books for adults?

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I like reading books and stories that are Halloween themed. But I am almost finished with October Dreams (which I love) So I was looking for some suggestions for other books to read. They have to evoke the Halloween spirit and preferably contain something Halloween themed like jack o lanterns, trick or treaters, haunted houses, stuff like that. I've looked at reviews on Amazon but I figured who better to ask than hardcore Halloween fans.

I really enjoyed Ray Bradbury's "Something Wicked This Way Comes". He's done a lot of books that are Halloweenish. I also own "The Halloween Tree", "The Homecoming", and "October Country", all good Halloween books but the first two were meant for kids.

It's meant for kids, but I really liked Boris and Bella. I thought it was too mature for the preschoolers I taught, so I kept it. It's a picture book, but I like reading it a few times during the Halloween season.

I am reading a book called the Trick Or Treat Murder....when I find it I will post the author...its a light, fun Halloween read!

I'll second Ray Bradbury's Something Wicked This Way Comes. Also his From The Dust Returned, especially if you get the audio book read by John Glover. I have mixed feelings about his book The Halloween Tree, written for "young adult" readers. The prose quality ranges from spare and evocative to purple and maudlin. Better is his mystery novel A Graveyard for Lunatics, which begins on Hallowe'en, and is set at a movie studio that shares a back wall with a cemetery.

If you haven't already read it, Madeleine L'Engle's classic novel A Wrinkle in Time does begin with "It was a dark and stormy night", and has three witchy characters.

What else?

How about some individual short stories:
• Washington Irving's picturesque The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, which I love and re-read often. Hallowe'en is never mentioned (and was probably unknown to the Dutch-Americans in the story), but the climax does take place after a party on an autumn night.
• Nathaniel Hawthorne's Young Goodman Brown, set on an autumn night in Salem, Massachusetts around the time of the witchcraft trials.

I have never read any of Ray Bradbury's stories but I have heard that they are a little hard to read. Like maybe he is too descriptive and uses strange metaphors. Do those of you who have read him think this?

Hard to read? No. I started reading Bradbury when I was 14, and by 18 had finished most of his books.

Uses a lot of metaphors? Yes. He's joked about his editor trimming down the number per page.

Read the first three pages of Dandelion Wine, with its description of the 12-year-old protagonist "waking" his town on the first day of summer:

It was a quiet morning, the town covered over with darkness and at ease in bed. Summer gathered in the weather, the wind had the proper touch, the breathing of the world was long and warm and slow. You had only to rise, lean from your window, and know that this indeed was the first real time of freedom and living, this was the first morning of summer.

And the first few pages of Something Wicked This Way Comes, for its ominous foreshadowing:

The seller of lighting rods arrived just ahead of the storm. He came along the street of Green Town, Illinois, in the late cloudy October day, sneaking glances over his shoulder. Somewhere not so far back, vast lightnings stomped the earth. Somewhere a storm like a great beast with terrible teeth could not be denied.

I'm a big fan of Clive Barker and he wrote a book called "The Thief of Always". It's actually a fairly short novel and I need to read it again. But anyway the story is about a boy who goes to a strange house and falls into a world where each morning of every day is Springtime, each afternoon is Summer, and every evening is Fall--with Halloween and Trick-or-Treating. And of course nighttime is Winter. When he returns to the real world he finds that each day he lived there--a year had passed in real time.
It's a really good read and I think the book is about 14 years old.

I haven't read this, but it looks like it would be an excellent read:

Harvest Tales & Midnight Revels: Stories For The Waning Of The Year by Michael Mayhew

Here is the review from amazon.com:

"Harvest Tales & Midnight Revels is both a guide to giving storytelling parties at Halloween, and an anthology of original tales. Editor Michael Mayhew begins by describing how much he used to enjoy Halloween as a kid, especially for its affirmation in the face of death: "You may get me someday, but tonight I am alive!" As an adult, he missed the "magical shivers" of those eerie nights. So he started an annual gathering in which people would feast and tell stories.

The large middle part of the book is an anthology of the best read-aloud pieces that were shared with others at those parties: 16 stories and 3 poems. The only rule they had was that the story had to relate to Halloween in some way. So it's a mixed bag of creepy, quiet, corny, tacky, gory, and just plain silly tales--with such topics as late-night meetings with strangers, adventures in an urban underground, a pagan woman (i.e., witch) of the old times, and even "the gunk in the bottom of the refrigerator." None is longer than 2,500 words--a length that when read aloud comes to about 15 minutes.

The final section is a primer on how to give your own storytelling party, with suggestions for the number of guests, how to solicit stories, and how to plan the evening. Some of the ideas are awkwardly overstated for an adult book--surely everyone knows how to throw a potluck--but most of them, including suggested decor and music, seem well-founded.

"If I could share only one thing about what we did and learned over ten years of story parties," writes Mayhew, "it would be this: the Halloween that shrieked with glee when you were eight is still out there, only now it murmurs to itself in the dead of night..." --Fiona Webster "

Darn, that sounds really good, I may have to get a copy of this myself...

Here is a bit of near worthless information. There is a paperback book out that has a collection of Halloween-related stories. Some stories were ok, a few were very good in evoking the Fall/Halloween spirit. The cover is printed in day-glo ink and has a warped photo of kids(?) in Halloween masks. Now here's the bad part - I don't know the title, editor, date of publication, publisher, etc. I sold it at a show a few years ago and have regretted it a number of times.
If anyone has any iinformation about the paperback I'm describing, please share!

Post Script: I did a search and came up with this compilation of horror-related books - there may be a few interesting choices there...
http://heightslibrary.org/wordpress/undeadrat/?p=27