Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly meme hosted by The Broke and the Bookish. This week’s theme is a Halloween themed freebie!
Even though I rarely read horror, I have quite a few titles sitting on my TBR pile. So, here are my top 10 horror books that I want to read.
The Night Sister by Jennifer McMahon
Once the thriving attraction of rural Vermont, the Tower Motel now stands in disrepair, alive only in the memories of Amy, Piper, and Piper’s kid sister, Margot. The three played there as girls until the day that their games uncovered something dark and twisted in the motel’s past, something that ruined their friendship forever.
Something is out there, something terrifying that must not be seen. One glimpse of it, and a person is driven to deadly violence. No one knows what it is or where it came from.
Five years after it began, a handful of scattered survivors remains, including Malorie and her two young children. Living in an abandoned house near the river, she has dreamed of fleeing to a place where they might be safe. Now that the boy and girl are four, it’s time to go, but the journey ahead will be terrifying: twenty miles downriver in a rowboat–blindfolded–with nothing to rely on but her wits and the children’s trained ears. One wrong choice and they will die. Something is following them all the while, but is it man, animal, or monster?
The Girl from the Well by Rin Chupeco
A dead girl walks the streets.
She hunts murderers. Child killers, much like the man who threw her body down a well three hundred years ago.
And when a strange boy bearing stranger tattoos moves into the neighborhood so, she discovers, does something else. And soon both will be drawn into the world of eerie doll rituals and dark Shinto exorcisms that will take them from American suburbia to the remote valleys and shrines of Aomori, Japan.
A Monster Calls by Patrick Ness
The monster showed up after midnight. As they do.
But it isn’t the monster Conor’s been expecting. He’s been expecting the one from his nightmare, the one he’s had nearly every night since his mother started her treatments, the one with the darkness and the wind and the screaming…
This monster is something different, though. Something ancient, something wild. And it wants the most dangerous thing of all from Conor.
This is the way the world ends: with a nanosecond of computer error in a Defense Department laboratory and a million casual contacts that form the links in a chain letter of death.
And here is the bleak new world of the day after: a world stripped of its institutions and emptied of 99 percent of its people. A world in which a handful of panicky survivors choose sides — or are chosen. A world in which good rides on the frail shoulders of the 108-year-old Mother Abagail — and the worst nightmares of evil are embodied in a man with a lethal smile and unspeakable powers: Randall Flagg, the dark man.
Something strange is happening at the Orsk furniture superstore in Cleveland, Ohio. Every morning, employees arrive to find broken Kjerring bookshelves, shattered Glans water goblets, and smashed Liripip wardrobes. Sales are down, security cameras reveal nothing, and store managers are panicking.
To unravel the mystery, three employees volunteer to work a nine-hour dusk-till-dawn shift. In the dead of the night, they’ll patrol the empty showroom floor, investigate strange sights and sounds, and encounter horrors that defy the imagination.
Charles Talent Manx has a way with children. He likes to take them for rides in his 1938 Rolls-Royce Wraith with the NOS4A2 vanity plate. With his old car, he can slip right out of the everyday world, and onto the hidden roads that transport them to an astonishing – and terrifying – playground of amusements he calls “Christmasland.”
The year was 2014. We had cured cancer. We had beaten the common cold. But in doing so we created something new, something terrible that no one could stop.
The infection spread, virus blocks taking over bodies and minds with one, unstoppable command: FEED. Now, twenty years after the Rising, bloggers Georgia and Shaun Mason are on the trail of the biggest story of their lives – the dark conspiracy behind the infected.
By These Ten Bones by Clare B Dunkle
A mysterious young man has come to a small Highland town. His talent for wood carving soon wins the admiration of the weaver’s daughter, Maddie. Fascinated by the silent carver, she sets out to gain his trust, only to find herself drawn into a terrifying secret that threatens everything she loves.
There is an evil presence in the carver’s life that cannot be controlled, and Maddie watches her town fall under a shadow. One by one, people begin to die. Caught in the middle, Maddie must decide what matters most to her-and what price she is willing to pay to keep it.
The Stepford Wives by Ira Levin
For Joanna, her husband, Walter, and their children, the move to beautiful Stepford seems almost too good to be true. It is. For behind the town’s idyllic facade lies a terrible secret — a secret so shattering that no one who encounters it will ever be the same.
Bird Box and NOS4R2 are awesome, I’d recommend them. I’ve yet to read the Stand too, even though I’m a big King fan.
Great list.
My Halloween TTT: https://samwhitehousewriter.wordpress.com/2015/10/27/top-ten-tuesday-halloween-top-ten-fictional-fighters-of-evil/
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Good! I’m glad to hear that you enjoyed those two. I’m really looking forward to reading them both. 🙂
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These all look great! I loved The Girl From the Well!
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Thanks! I’m glad to hear The Girl From the Well is good. I’m going to have to read it soon!
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Wow. The Night Sister sounds like it would be an amazing movie if it would ever be turned into one.
ADVANCE HAPPY HALLOWEEN!
Here’s mine I hope you check it out 🙂 MY TOP TEN TUESDAY
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Thanks, Christine! Happy Halloween to you as well!
I’m reading The Night Sister right now and agree. It would make a great movie.
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I’ve read A Monster Calls. That book had me bawling. Great picks!
My TTT: http://wp.me/p4uAPW-1UQ
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Thanks! I’ll be prepared with tissues when I go to start reading A Monster Calls. 🙂
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horror books are so not my thing but this looks like a great well-thought-out list! 🙂 My TTT
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Thanks, Carrie!
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I’ve always wanted to read anything by Joe Hill, everyone has been recommending it alot 😀 Cool list! My TTT.
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Thanks! I’ve never read anything but Joe Hill either but have been hearing a lot of great things.
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Oh man, such a great list, The Night Sister and NOS4A2 such amazing novels.
My ttt
http://hauntedgravebooks.blogspot.com/2015/10/top-ten-tuesday-ten-books-that-were.html
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Thanks! I’m glad to hear that you really like NOS4A2 and The Night Sister!
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Bird Box looks sooooo good!
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I’ve heard a lot of great things about that one too!
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Great list! I’m ashamed to say I’ve only read The Stand. I have Feed waiting TBR. I want to get Bird box
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Thanks! I’ve only seen the mini-series of the The Stand, but I loved it. Can’t wait to finally get around to reading it.
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