It is 7 October. There are 24 days until Halloween.

My reading tastes skew toward horror throughout the year. I’ll throw in a British cozy mystery, a western, or anything Joe R. Lansdale writes from time to time as a palate cleanser, but I’ll always return to the darker, spookier fare on my bookshelves. (And that also includes anything Joe R. Lansdale writes.)

During the month of October my horror reading gets turned up to 11. There are quite a few mainstays in my Halloween reading list, titles that I’ve turned to again and again throughout the years, but I do try to fold in some new authors and works into the mix. 

Here’s what’s on my bedside table – and just about every other flat surface in my apartment. Some of these I read from cover to cover; others I dip into for a scene or two.

I think I am going on at least ten years in a row reading Stephen King's 1975 vampires-in-a-small-town novel, 'Salem's Lot. I love the way he deftly moves amongst the people of the Lot, writing vignettes outlining the terrible things they do, allowing them to accumulate until you get a full picture of the town. Then, he jumps back into the main story without missing a beat. Great stuff!

I had a Horror Literature class in undergrad. One of the stories we read was "Carmilla" by J.S. LeFanu. Very good female vampire story that Hammer Studios turned into The Vampire Lovers with Ingrid Pitt.

This one's another Halloween no-brainer. You gotta read Lovecraft if you're gonna do Halloween right. There's so much Lovecraft in the air, I wasn't sure if I was going to include any this year. But then I thought of "The Dunwich Horror" and knew I had to read it again.

This is bargain bin special I bought when I worked in a corporate bookstore chain that shall go unnamed. I mainly bought it because it included "The Human Chair" by Edogawa Rampo. That Harlan Ellison introduced the story was just an added bonus. Great stuff all around in this collection.

David J. Skal has written at length on spooky movies, so it was only a matter of time until he turned his attention to the holiday made for horror movies. Did you know that at the time this book was written that the only known and documented case of candy tampering was in the 1970s by a Texas father who poisoned his own kids with cyanide in a Pixie Dust straw?

Another bargain bin special. The World's Greatest Horror Stories is actually made up of the stories that H.P. Lovecraft discussed in his landmark essay "Supernatural Horror in Literature." Every story in this collection is a winner, especially E.F. Benson's "Negotium Perambulans."

I mentioned Dark: Stories of Madness, Murder, and the Supernatural in an earlier post. It's worth a second mention. Loads of great stuff here from across the spectrum of literature (with a lower and uppercase L).

Night Shift is a Paperbacks from Hell special guest star this Halloween. It's been a while since I jumped into these stories, but early Stephen King is a writer who wears his love of the pulps and E.C. Comics on his sleeve.

Plus, get a load of what's under the cover!

I mean...look at it!

Swan Song by Robert R. McCammon is a book and an author that I've never read. I've been sitting on this paperback for quite a while. Time to check it out!

Forgotten Horrors is one of my favorite podcasts. Michael H. Price and John Wooley talk about (mainly) horror films from (mainly) the middle part of the 20th century. The podcast is based on a amazing collection of books that share the same main title: Forgotten Horrors. I've got the first one and it looks at the genre from the late twenties until the end of the 1930s. Great pocket reviews that I aspire to. 

I don't think you can celebrate Halloween properly without these two books handy. They are fun to just pick up and run through a handful of pages, allowing Bradbury's particular style to sweep you off your feet. Also, it always surprises me that he has such a dark vision for a guy who looked like everyone's favorite uncle.