For many, the perfect evening in October includes mulled cider, sweet treats, and a cult classic movie like Halloweentown. For us, no ghoulish night is complete without an equally spooky book to read and friends to discuss it with!
Picture this: it’s a cool October night, you’re lounging in your pajamas, devouring the spookiest book on your shelf. But wait, it gets even better. One week from now you’re meeting up with your bookish friends to chat about that scary read over wine and candy corn. Spooky season is officially here! Read on for our favorite spooky book club books, Halloween book club ideas for your October meeting, and thrilling and chilling book clubs to join to keep that Halloween spirit going all year round!
Our Top Halloween Book Club Book Picks
Looking for a hair-raising read with your book club? Bookclubs has you covered with these spooky book club picks, all of which have ready-to-go book club questions on our site! We've updated this list with some exciting new 2024 releases.
If you're looking for something more in the magical or witchy vein, we've got you covered with these thirteen witch-themed books across multiple genres (including some lighter and more romantic fare).
New in 2024! The God of the Woods by Liz Moore
When a teenager vanishes from her Adirondack summer camp, two worlds collide
Early morning, August 1975: a camp counselor discovers an empty bunk. Its occupant, Barbara Van Laar, has gone missing. Barbara isn't just any thirteen-year-old: she's the daughter of the family that owns the summer camp and employs most of the region's residents. And this isn't the first time a Van Laar child has disappeared. Barbara's older brother similarly vanished fourteen years ago, never to be found.
As a panicked search begins, a thrilling drama unfolds. Chasing down the layered secrets of the Van Laar family and the blue-collar community working in its shadow, Moore's multi-threaded story invites readers into a rich and gripping dynasty of secrets and second chances. It is Liz Moore's most ambitious and wide-reaching novel yet.
New in 2024! The Midnight Feast by Lucy Foley
It's the opening night of The Manor, the newest and hottest luxury resort, and no expense, small or large, has been spared. The infinity pool sparkles; the "Manor Mule" cocktail (grapefruit, ginger, vodka, and a dash of CBD oil) is being poured with a heavy hand. Everyone is wearing linen.
But under the burning midsummer sun, darkness stirs. Old friends and enemies circulate among the guests. Just outside the Manor's immaculately kept grounds, an ancient forest bristles with secrets. And it's not too long before the local police are called. Turns out the past has crashed the party, with deadly results.
Everyone's got a secret. Everyone's got an agenda. But not everyone will survive...The Midnight Feast
New in 2024! Middle of the Night by Riley Sager
The worst thing to ever happen on Hemlock Circle occurred in Ethan Marsh’s backyard. One July night, ten-year-old Ethan and his best friend and neighbor, Billy, fell asleep in a tent set up on a manicured lawn in a quiet, quaint New Jersey cul-de-sac. In the morning, Ethan woke up alone. During the night, someone had sliced the tent open with a knife and taken Billy. He was never seen again.
Thirty years later, Ethan has reluctantly returned to his childhood home. Plagued by bad dreams and insomnia, he begins to notice strange things happening in the middle of the night. Someone seems to be roaming the cul-de-sac at odd hours, and signs of Billy’s presence keep appearing in Ethan’s backyard. Is someone playing a cruel prank? Or has Billy, long thought to be dead, somehow returned to Hemlock Circle?
The mysterious occurrences prompt Ethan to investigate what really happened that night, a quest that reunites him with former friends and neighbors and leads him into the woods that surround Hemlock Circle. Woods where Billy claimed ghosts roamed and where a mysterious institute does clandestine research on a crumbling estate.
The closer Ethan gets to the truth, the more he realizes that no place—be it quiet forest or suburban street—is completely safe. And that the past has a way of haunting the present.
New in 2024! One Perfect Couple by Ruth Ware
Lyla is in a bit of a rut. Her post-doctoral research has fizzled out, she's pretty sure they won't extend her contract, and things with her boyfriend, Nico, an aspiring actor, aren't going great. When the opportunity arises for Nico to join the cast of a new reality TV show, One Perfect Couple, she agrees to try out with him.
A whirlwind audition process later, Lyla finds herself whisked off to a tropical paradise with Nico, boating through the Indian Ocean towards Ever After Island, where the two of them will compete against four other couples--Bayer and Angel, Dan and Santana, Joel and Romi, and Conor and Zana--in order to win a cash prize.
But not long after they arrive on the deserted island, things start to go wrong. After the first challenge leaves everyone rattled and angry, an overnight storm takes matters from bad to worse. Cut off from the mainland by miles of ocean, deprived of their phones, and unable to contact the crew that brought them there, the group must band together for survival. As tensions run high and fresh water runs low, Lyla finds that this game show is all too real--and the stakes are life or death.
Daisy Darker by Alice Feeney
Daisy Darker was born with a broken heart. Now after years of avoiding each other, Daisy Darker’s entire family is assembling for Nana’s 80th birthday party in her crumbling gothic house on a tiny tidal island. The family arrives, each of them harboring secrets. When the tide comes in, they will be cut off from the rest of the world for eight hours.
But at the stroke of midnight, as a storm rages, Nana is found dead. And an hour later, the next family member follows...
Trapped on an island where someone is killing them one by one, the Darkers must reckon with their present mystery as well as their past secrets, before the tide goes out and all is revealed.
Verity by Colleen Hoover
Lowen Ashleigh is a struggling writer on the brink of financial ruin when she accepts the job offer of a lifetime. Jeremy Crawford, husband of bestselling author Verity Crawford, has hired Lowen to complete the remaining books in a successful series his injured wife is unable to finish.
Lowen arrives at the Crawford home, ready to sort through years of Verity’s notes and outlines, hoping to find enough material to get her started. What Lowen doesn’t expect to uncover in the chaotic office is an unfinished autobiography Verity never intended for anyone to read. Page after page of bone-chilling admissions, including Verity's recollection of the night her family was forever altered.
Lowen decides to keep the manuscript hidden from Jeremy, knowing its contents could devastate the already grieving father. But as Lowen’s feelings for Jeremy begin to intensify, she recognizes all the ways she could benefit if he were to read his wife’s words. After all, no matter how devoted Jeremy is to his injured wife, a truth this horrifying would make it impossible for him to continue loving her.
None of This Is True by Lisa Jewell
Celebrating her forty-fifth birthday at her local pub, popular podcaster Alix Summer crosses paths with an unassuming woman called Josie Fair. Josie, it turns out, is also celebrating her forty-fifth birthday. They are, in fact, birthday twins.
A few days later, Alix and Josie bump into each other again, this time outside Alix’s children’s school. Josie has been listening to Alix’s podcasts and thinks she might be an interesting subject for her series. She is, she tells Alix, on the cusp of great changes in her life.
Josie’s life appears to be strange and complicated, and although Alix finds her unsettling, she can’t quite resist the temptation to keep making the podcast. Slowly she starts to realize that Josie has been hiding some very dark secrets, and before she knows it, Josie has inveigled her way into Alix’s life—and into her home.
But, as quickly as she arrived, Josie disappears. Only then does Alix discover that Josie has left a terrible and terrifying legacy in her wake, and that Alix has become the subject of her own true crime podcast, with her life and her family’s lives under mortal threat.
When No One Is Watching by Alyssa Cole
Rear Window meets Get Out in this gripping thriller, in which the gentrification of a Brooklyn neighborhood takes on a sinister new meaning…
Sydney Green is Brooklyn born and raised, but her beloved neighborhood seems to change every time she blinks. Condos are sprouting like weeds, FOR SALE signs are popping up overnight, and the neighbors she’s known all her life are disappearing. To hold onto her community’s past and present, Sydney channels her frustration into a walking tour and finds an unlikely and unwanted assistant in one of the new arrivals to the block—her neighbor Theo.
But Sydney and Theo’s deep dive into history quickly becomes a dizzying descent into paranoia and fear. Their neighbors may not have moved to the suburbs after all, and the push to revitalize the community may be more deadly than advertised.
When does coincidence become conspiracy? Where do people go when gentrification pushes them out? Can Sydney and Theo trust each other—or themselves—long enough to find out before they too disappear?
The Cloisters by Katy Hays
When Ann Stilwell arrives in New York City, she expects to spend her summer working as a curatorial associate at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Instead, she finds herself assigned to The Cloisters, a gothic museum and garden renowned for its medieval art collection and its group of enigmatic researchers studying the history of divination.
Desperate to escape her painful past, Ann is happy to indulge the researchers’ more outlandish theories about the history of fortune telling. But what begins as academic curiosity quickly turns into obsession when Ann discovers a hidden 15th-century deck of tarot cards that might hold the key to predicting the future. When the dangerous game of power, seduction, and ambition at The Cloisters turns deadly, Ann becomes locked in a race for answers as the line between the arcane and the modern blurs.
Hour of the Witch by Chris Bohjalian
Boston, 1662. Mary Deerfield is twenty-four-years-old. Her skin is porcelain, her eyes delft blue, and in England she might have had many suitors. But here in the New World, amid this community of saints, Mary is the second wife of Thomas Deerfield, a man as cruel as he is powerful. When Thomas, prone to drunken rage, drives a three-tined fork into the back of Mary's hand, she resolves that she must divorce him to save her life.
But in a world where every neighbor is watching for signs of the devil, a woman like Mary—a woman who harbors secret desires and finds it difficult to tolerate the brazen hypocrisy of so many men in the colony—soon becomes herself the object of suspicion and rumor. When tainted objects are discovered buried in Mary's garden, when a boy she has treated with herbs and simples dies, and when their servant girl runs screaming in fright from her home, Mary must fight to not only escape her marriage, but also the gallows.
She Is a Haunting by Trang Thanh Tran
When Jade Nguyen arrives in Vietnam for a visit with her estranged father, she has one goal: survive five weeks pretending to be a happy family in the French colonial house Ba is restoring. She's always lied to fit in, so if she's straight enough, Vietnamese enough, American enough, she can get out with the college money he promised.
But the house has other plans. Night after night, Jade wakes up paralyzed. The walls exude a thrumming sound while bugs leave their legs and feelers in places they don't belong. She finds curious traces of her ancestors in the gardens they once tended. And at night Jade can't ignore the ghost of the beautiful bride who leaves cryptic warnings: Don't eat.
Neither Ba nor her sweet sister Lily believe that there is anything strange happening. With help from a delinquent girl, Jade will prove this house--the home they have always wanted--will not rest until it destroys them. Maybe, this time, she can keep her family together. As she roots out the house's rot, she must also face the truth of who she is and who she must become to save them all.
Over My Dead Body: Unearthing the Hidden History of America's Cemeteries by Greg Melville
The summer before his senior year in college, Greg Melville worked at the cemetery in his hometown, and thanks to hour upon hour of pushing a mower over the grassy acres, he came to realize what a rich story the place told of his town and its history. Thus was born Melville's lifelong curiosity with how, where, and why we bury and commemorate our dead.
Melville's Over My Dead Body is a lively (pun intended) and wide-ranging history of cemeteries, places that have mirrored the passing eras in history but also have shaped it.
Cemeteries have given birth to landscape architecture and famous parks, as well as influenced architectural styles. They've inspired and motivated some of our greatest poets and authors--Emerson, Whitman, Dickinson. They've been used as political tools to shift the country's discourse and as important symbols of the United States' ambition and reach. But they are changing and fading. Embalming and burial is incredibly toxic, and while cremations have just recently surpassed burials in popularity, they're not great for the environment either. Over My Dead Body explores everything about cemeteries--history, sustainability, land use, and more--and what it really means to memorialize.
If you've already chosen a book and are looking for help jump-starting your discussion, check out our book club questions for mystery books and book club questions for thriller and horror books.
Ideas for hosting a Halloween book club meeting
Hosting a Halloween-themed meeting for your book club? Here are 6 ideas to spice (or spook) up your get together!
- Dress the part: encourage members to dress up as their favorite literary characters. Award prizes for the most creative costumes! (Have anyone getting stuck check out our ideas for last-minute literary Halloween costumes)
- Set the scene: Candlelight, fake cobwebs, and eerie decorations can help to set the mood. If you're feeling crafty, you can even create some DIY Halloween book decorations like this banner or garland.
- Set the table: There are so many fun ideas for spooky or cute Halloween treats. This is one of our favorite holidays to do themed food and drinks for!
- Share a ghost story: After your main book discussion, have each member share a short ghost story or urban legend.
- Watch a scary movie: If your chosen book has a film version, consider watching it together after your discussion (or, like in our house, just watch Nightmare Before Christmas for the 20th time!)
- Try out some trivia: Test everyone's knowledge of spooky literature.
Join a spooky online book club and celebrate Halloween all year round
If you love thrillers, mysteries, horror, or true crime and are looking for like-minded folks to read with, then you’ve come to the right place. Here's a list of spook-tastic book clubs looking for new members to join + their Fall 2024 reading picks.
Thriller book clubs
- Thrillers By The Book Club Online: Look In the Mirror by Catherine Steadman
- Final Girls Book Club: Out There Screaming: An Anthology of New Black Horror, edited by Jordan Peele
- Thrillers & Drama & Horror, Oh My!: Home Before Dark by Riley Sager
Mystery book clubs
- Mystery Book Club: Velvet Was the Night by Silvia Moreno-Garcia
- No Clue Mystery Book Club: The Hollow Places by T. Kingfisher
- M.O. Book Club: One of Us is Lying by Karen M. McManus
- Thursday Night Murder Club: The Murder of Roger Ackroyd by Agatha Christie
- Misteria Book Club: Death by Dumpling by Vivien Chien
Horror book clubs
- The Dark Resonance Book Club: The Reformatory by Tananarive Due
- In The Void: Horror Movie by Paul Tremblay
- READ by DAWN: Slewfoot: A Tale of Bewitchery by Brom
- Queer Horror: Our Hideous Progeny by C.E. McGill
True Crime book clubs
- True Crime Tales: If You Tell: A True Story of Murder, Family Secrets, and the Unbreakable Bond of Sisterhood by Gregg Olsen
- Cocktails and Crimes: East West Street: On the Origins of "Genocide" and "Crimes Against Humanity" by Philippe Sands
Start reading with one of these chilling book clubs, or discover even more thriller, horror, mystery or true crime book clubs to join.
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