Creepy Stories for Halloween

Categories: Movies & Books , Digital Audiobooks , Science Fiction & Fantasy , Horror & Supernatural , Fiction

We tend to think of scary books at Halloween, and I'll take this chance to promote some of my favorite creepy audio books and reading for any dark night.

The Edgar Allan Poe Audio Collection is read by Vincent Price and Basil Rathbone. Poe's work distills all that is eerie, and these two masters of voice bring the recordings to chilling life.

The Shining by Stephen King is a perennial favorite, good at the movies but terrific as the original book.

Peter Straub's Lost Boy Lost Girl is as creepy as it gets, an excellent read along with its sequel In The Night Room.

And don't forget the Classics: Frankenstein by Mary Shelley; Dracula by Bram Stoker and the wonderful silent film Nosferatu; and even War of the Worlds by HG Wells, which was a written work long before it was performed as a radio play or movie.

The Talisman and Black House, collaborations of Peter Straub and Stephen King, is a deep dark quest of a boy to parallel worlds and monstrous places. Frank Muller gives the story a wonderful voice in audio format.

Clive Barker wins in my estimation as the creepiest, with his combinations of fantasy, horror, and suspense. His A-Z Of Horror, while not a novel, is a fascinatingly weird look into his inspirations. This is the man who thought up Hellraiser, and now we see where it came from.