A place to talk about anything Fantasy related. Really it can be anything from books, video games, artwork to film!
So it is October. I would love to hear your favorite books that have ghouls, vampires, werewolves and more!
Maybe we can get the /horror community to chip in as well!
Some classic examples of horror:
- Dracula by Bram Stoker
- Frankenstein by Mary Shelley
- The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson
More Horror-Halloween-Spooky-Fantasy Stories:
- Coraline by Neil Gaiman
- Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets by JK Rowling (Nearly Headless Nick celebrates his 500th Deathday in this one okay?)
- The Book of Lost Things by John Connolly
- The Halloween Tree by Ray Bradbury
- And the one that made me think about this The Hawk and His Boy by Christopher Bunn. (I read it ages ago but I am 90% sure it is this series where if you accidentally talk to a ghost they follow you and annoy you.)
- I really could go on...
So now, what are yours?! :D




The Gates by John Connolly takes place on Halloween, and it's more comedy than horror. It's all about a boy and his dog fighting demons that drink beer, and Hell's gates opening on Halloween so that everyone mistakes demons for costume partiers! Halloween British comedy!
Super-excited to see John Connolly on your list! :D He's such a great writer but nobody in my circles reads him.
I'd def recommend his Charlie Parker -series; both the individual plots and the over-arching one are very creepy and fascinating, and the prose itself is just gorgeous. The genre is a great mix of PI stories and supernatural horror with an overlay of bleakness, though it occasionally gets gory and/or disturbing enough that I wouldn't recommend it to anyone under fifteen.
Bad Men is a stand-alone that's a pretty good introduction to the author's work, if you're not looking for a series.
Or if short stories are more your thing, try Nocturnes.
I've read Dracula a couple of times but, to be honest, I think Stoker's other work is much better: The Jewel of Seven Stars and Dracula's Guest and Other Weird Tales in particular.
Another person who reads him!!
I will definitely check out Nocturnes. 😊
A side note about The Jewel of Seven Stars: a few years after it was first published, there was a new edition put out with the last chapter changed (possibly without Stoker's input) to a more conventionally straightforward happy ending. Most subsequent editions have used the new (and, in my opinion, inferior) ending, and you have to look carefully to find one that has the original. The 2008 Penguin Classics edition includes both endings and lets the reader make up their own mind.
Interesting, I wasn't aware of this! Got to check now which one I've read. :)
On a sidenote, the ending of Dracula has always felt kind of slapped on to me, one of the reasons my opinion of the novel isn't too high.
The Somnambulist by Jonathan Barnes is a delightfully weird, unsettling kind of steampunk zombie-monster story. It's not quite horrific, but hauntingly eerie in a way that makes you drift back to it again sometimes even years later.
The Johannes Cabal series by Jonathan Howard, starting with Johannes Cabal the Necromancer. He's a necromancer of some little infamy...and also prissiness, and bad temper, and large-caliber pistols. There are also affable vampires, zombies (of course), demonic carnivals, Nyarlathotep in a good mood, and hilarity. Comedic pulp adventure where you never have to feel too bad for the protagonist because he really brings it on himself.
The Cal Leandros series by Rob Thurman, starting with Nightlife. Elves are primal naked killing machines with sadistic plans for the world, and Cal and his brother Niko have spent their lives running away from them.
HTML markup isn't allowed in Imzy comments, but you can add a link by putting square brackets around the link text and following it with the url in parentheses, like this:
The Johannes Cabal series by Jonathan Howard, starting with Johannes Cabal the Necromancer.
Yeah, I fixed it. I must have hit a glitch because I couldn't get that to work the first time.
Faerie Tale by Raymond Feist is one of my favorite October reads.
I love your username! ANd that book sounds delightfully creepy. :D
Thanks! :)
A Night in the Lonesome October by Roger Zelazny is one of my favourite books, and does indeed have ghouls, vampires, werewolves, and more (including Frankensteinian monsters, witches, druids, mad monks, evil cult leaders, Lovecraftian monstrosities, and a famous detective wondering what all of the above are doing in the same place at one time).
It's topical, too, since it's written as what I've seen described as an advent calendar for Halloween: there are 31 chapters, one for each day of October, and I know people who re-read it every year, one chapter on each day.
Oh nice! Is each chapter a self contained story?
No, it's a novel with an ongoing plot. Each chapter covers the events of a single day, so Chapter 1 is set on October 1, and Chapter 2 is set on October 2, and so on up to the big climactic confrontation on October 31.
The premise of the plot is that there's a magical ritual that can only be performed in "the proper place in the proper year on a night in the lonesome October when the moon shines full on Halloween", which will change the world. Some of the characters are there to take part in it, and some of the characters are there to stop it happening. Before the big ritual, there are preparations to make, artifacts to gather, and a lot of maneuvring as they all try to figure out who's on which side, without giving their own allegiance away to someone who might be working for the opposition and given to lethal methods of improving their odds.
You beat me to it. One of my very favorite October reads.