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Some Short Horror Novels You Can Finish by Halloween
You still have time
Somehow, and I have no idea how, we’re at mid-October already. That means it’s only two weeks until Halloween, which is fine if you’re binge-watching horror films every night this month but not great if your goal was to read one or more scary novels during the spooky season. Unless you’re either a speed-reader or someone with vast amounts of free time, tackling one of Stephen King’s massive tomes may already be a bridge too far for you.
Fortunately, there are more than a few horror novels that aren’t the size of a cinder block that you can complete by Halloween, even at a leisurely pace. This is especially important if, like me, you only read horror during daylight hours because you were scarred by a book by the aforementioned Mr. King as a child.
1. The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson. The Penguin Deluxe Classics Edition of this novel runs a totally manageable 272 pages. I put this one first because it’s my favorite, and if you’ve never read it you absolutely should. Stephen King reviewed the novel in his 1981 non-fiction book on the horror genre, Danse Macabre, calling it “one of the finest horror novels of the late 20th century.” It regularly lands on lists of the best horror ever written.
