The darkness that spills from Joe Hill’s pen should be read in October while dead leaves rustle, tree branches scrape at window panes and ghouls seem to climb out of long shadows. Start with Hill’s short story collection, Twentieth Century Ghosts, with its museum of last breaths and forlorn specters that haunt theaters. Want something scarier? Try Heart-Shaped Box and you’ll meet a musician being attacked by a vengeful spirit through a suit bought online. Not in the mood for ghosts? Have a look at Horns, Hill’s newest novel, where a young man tries to figure out why he woke up with devil horns. Whatever Joe Hill book you choose, be ready for a tale best told at twilight.

H.P. Lovecraft was a writer of the weird. Lovecraft’s tales usually involved the idea that reality is a thin veil and when it is torn, those that see the horrors and truths behind it often go insane. In Lovecraft Unbound, Ellen Datlow has collected twenty stories framed in Lovecraftian elements. Pulitzer Prize winner Michael Chabon and National Book Award winner Joyce Carol Oates both appear. “The Crevasse” by Dale Bailey and Nathan Ballingrud is a standout story about an arctic exploration with a monster that stays at shadow’s edge. Laird Barron’s “Catch Hell” unearths occult rituals performed in a magnolia-lined small town. No one here is trying to be Lovecraft, but they are giving his themes of fate and forbidden knowledge new life.

Shirley Jackson is most widely known for “The Lottery,” a short story that she meant as “…a graphic dramatization of the pointless violence and general inhumanity” in people’s lives, which caused subscription cancelations and hate mail to The New Yorker in 1948. Jackson continued her themes of societal unease with an added layer of agoraphobia in her novel We Have Always Lived in the Castle. The local village hates the Blackwood family. Merricat Blackwood only leaves her home to go to the library and the market. Merricat lives with her older sister, Constance, and her decrepit Uncle Julian. The rest of the family is dead. Murdered. But by who? Sympathetic magic, riots, a fire, repressed hatred and everlasting love all lead to the answer.