Sci-Fi and Fantasy Reads for the Spooky Season

I am mostly a science fiction and fantasy reader, so when October rolls around and I am looking for something a little more seasonally appropriate, I don’t often stray all the way into horror. Fantasy provides plenty of monsters, while sci-fi provides the strange and alien. These are some that I have enjoyed.

I have quite a few vampire books on this list (and none of them sparkle). I can’t not mention Bram Stoker’s Dracula; told entirely through diary entries and letters, it’s a must-read for fans of the classics. A more modern version of this is the recent release from Stephen Graham Jones, The Buffalo Hunter Hunter. Also told through a diary from the early 1900s, it’s a Native American revenge story where you have to ask yourself who the real monster is. Salem’s Lot is Stephen King at his finest: a writer returning to his hometown in Maine has to face off against the vampire that has moved in. The beautiful anniversary hardback is very high on my list. Finally, I think I Am Legend by Richard Matheson is my favourite of the bunch. This follows the last survivor of a vampire pandemic as he struggles to survive alone and search for a cure. This is one of those books with a bunch of adaptations, but none of them quite get it right.

One of my favourite releases of this year was Red Winter by Cameron Sullivan. Lured by the promise of reconciliation with his estranged lover, we follow a demon-possessed professor as he returns to hunt the beast he thought he slayed 2 decades ago. Inspired by the real story of the Beast of Gévaudan that terrorised 18th-century France, this is clever, gory and surprisingly funny. Joe Abercrombie’s latest book, The Devils, is a super fun suicide squad-style adventure set in an alternate medieval Europe. The church sends its secret team of monsters, including a vampire, werewolf and necromancer, to escort a former thief and heir to the throne. Jim Butcher’s Dresden Files follows Harry Dresden, supernatural private detective and Chicago’s only professional wizard. The whole series is a lot of fun, each getting better as they go, and tackles all manner of paranormal threats. For something a bit lighter, Terry Pratchett’s Discworld has a whole sub-series of witch books, the first and best being Equal Rites. When a wizard accidentally passes his power to an eighth daughter of an eighth son, she must sneak into the misogynistic Unseen University with the help of Discworld’s most famous witch, Granny Weatherwax.

There’s something especially eerie about bodies being subsumed, modified, and used to create something new. Most of the plot summaries you will see for James S.A. Corey’s Expanse series describe it as a cool space opera with clever politics and a well-thought-out setting. But as you get further into Leviathan Wakes, you see more of the horrifying things the protomolecule does to people’s bodies, and there’s enough here to qualify. In a similar vein, you will see lots of praise for Adrian Tchaikovsky’s Children of Time series around great science, aliens, and world-building. But when you get to book two, Children of Ruin, there’s a new alien presence that’s truly scary in both a psychological and body horror way.

Translation State, by Ann Leckie, is technically within the world of the Imperial Radch series, but it’s very standalone. While the main series has its share of Body Snatchers-style uneasiness, Translation State amps this up with a new, dangerous alien species that has created Translators by reverse engineering dissected humans. Someone You Can Build A Nest In by John Wiswell is somehow a cosy romance and also a horror. Shesheshen is a shapeshifting monster that can construct a body from the remains of people she eats, and when she falls in love with one of the monster hunters looking for her, things get complicated. I think pretty much anything by T. Kingfisher is appropriate October reading, but Hemlock & Silver is featured here for the horrible monsters made from distorted parts of people (I won’t spoil why they exist). It’s about a poison-obsessed healer who is recruited by the King to identify how his daughter is being poisoned.

Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein is an absolute classic for giving life to the dead, and one that is still very readable today. Every adaptation so far has failed to capture the story, so you really just have to read it for yourself. Sporting one of my favourite taglines, “lesbian necromancers in space”, Tamsin Muir’s Gideon the Ninth is a unique mix of gothic horror, sci-fi, and razor-sharp humour. Lots of spooky mystery, memes, magic, and big swords; this whole series is surprisingly touching with loveable characters you can’t help but root for. Mary Robinette Kowal is one of my favourite authors, and Ghost Talkers is. It’s an alternate history WWI where soldiers are trained to report to the mediums of the Spirit Corps upon death, to relay information from the front lines. It’s more of a spy mystery as the characters uncover a secret plot, but hey, it’s got ghosts, it counts.

Songs of the Dead is a recent release from Peter Orullian and Brandon Sanderson and is worth it for the beautiful special edition alone. A London rocker is killed and awakens to find he is a necromancer and is immediately embroiled in a war between the living and the dead. In R.F. Kuang’s Katabasis, Cambridge students of magic descend into hell to retrieve their doctoral advisor. The Incandescent, by Emily Tesh, also features a magical school and demons, but this time we follow the teacher as she tries to keep the students safe.

Dan Simmons gives us a variety of stories in Hyperion, and some of them definitely skew towards horror. However, the menacing Shrike looms ominously throughout them all, connected to each of the pilgrims. The Tainted Cup is the first entry in Robert Jackson Bennett’s Shadow of the Leviathan, arguably the best ongoing series currently. Set to a backdrop of giant Kaiju that emerge from the sea every year, the whole thing has a spooky biological horror feel as they use the strange leviathan blood to engineer everything from plants to people. It’s essentially a Sherlock Holmes story with a genius detective and her assistant that has been magically altered for perfect memory. Another Adrian Tchaikovsky and another 2026 Hugo nominee (along with The Incandescent), Shroud is just an overall dark and spooky book. While studying a pitch-black moon that is completely inhospitable to human life but is somehow alive with radio signals, two scientists crash and have to survive the terrible creatures that live there. There Is No Antimemetics Division by qntm is definitely one of the more unique horror reads. The book explores antimemes: concepts that actively erase or consume information about themselves, and immediately demonstrates the very unsettling possibilities of a world where knowledge itself is unreliable.

Having enjoyed Christopher Buehlman’s other books, Between Two Fires is definitely high on my list to read. A medieval horror about a disgraced knight and an Orphan of the Black Death, and a battle of angels and demons. Jeff Vandermeer’s Annihilation is one of those books that everyone would put on a list like this, but somehow I have never got around to reading it, despite absolutely loving the movie. It follows an expedition of four women into the mysterious Area X. Writing this, I realise how I haven’t really read zombie novels, but The Girls With All The Gifts by M.R. Carey has been on my list for ages. It’s set in a zombie apocalypse where they are studying hybrid children to try and find a cure.