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Greet the Season: Read a Horror Novel This Fall

October 2, 2025

Horror is a polarizing genre.

I’ve learned this after we—meaning the Spokane Is Reading committee—selected The Reformatory by Tananarive Due as the 2025 featured Spokane Is Reading title.

Some people, upon hearing it was classified as horror, cheered.

Others told me, grimacing, “Ug. I hate horror.”

Since I joined the Spokane Is Reading team, we’ve amusingly (and unwittingly, I swear!) selected titles that greet the eerie vibe of October. Kim Fu’s Lesser Known Monsters of the 21^st Century, our 2023 selection, bends genre so that literary stories become fantastical, horrific, and surreal. Debra Magpie Earling’s Perma Red, our 2024 selection—one of the quintessential Northwest novels—harbors venomous snakes and ghosts. And now we’ve selected the extraordinary fiction of a beloved horror maestro, Tananarive Due, who has won the biggest awards you can win in the genre, including the Bram Stoker Award for Best Novel and the World Fantasy Award. Due even teaches courses at UCLA with titles such as, “The Sunken Place: Racism, Survival and the Black Horror Aesthetic,” classes that Get Out director Jordan Peele, himself, attended.

I like to joke that maybe Spokane Is Reading should change its name to Spokane Is Reading Horror. Let’s just embrace our October events for narratives about ghouls and goblins, right? We certainly have enough horror-loving readers on our committee to keep this new-found tradition going. I’m kidding, of course, but I did wonder if a cheerful romance featuring a witch might be something to recommend to the committee for next year.

Recently The Guardian posted an article, “Horror Novel Sales Boomed During Year of Real-World Anxieties,” stating that these sales experienced a whopping 54% gain from one year to the next.

In the article, horror author Jen Williams said, “Horror is a genre that tends to ebb and flow with what’s going on in the world at large, holding up a dark funfair mirror to real world horrors. Given we’re in a period of unsettling upheaval—wars, the pandemic, climate change—it’s interesting that horror is moving back into the spotlight and even reaching a larger audience.”

For me, horror provides a metaphorically engaging look at what is truly terrifying in our world. Tananarive Due’s The Reformatory is a ghost story, but it reads like historical literary fiction. The book’s true horror is the accurate setting of The Dozier School for Boys in Florida, a place where Due’s ancestor, her great uncle Robert Stephens, was killed.

My favorite works of horror—like Due’s The Reformatory—don’t rely on gore to terrify a reader. The best scary stories reveal how thin the lines are between the real and the unreal, the living and the dead, the reader and the protagonist. That some forces of evil feel too wicked and too powerful for us to overcome is not an inaccuracy or exaggeration. We witness the characters fighting hard for their lives and for those who they love and we want to fight alongside of them, too. It’s an oddly comforting genre for this reason. Yes, there are unspeakable nightmares unfolding all around us. Yes, we can name them, and we can fight back.

Spokane Public Library’s Events for Fall and Scary Season

Reframing Death: From Fear to Sacred Passage October 1 @ 4pm | South Hill Library

Wonderful, Weird, and Worrisome Objects in WA State Museums October 2 @ 5:30pm | South Hill Library

The Dying Process: Physical, Emotional, and Personal October 8 @ 4pm | South Hill Library

Illuminations: Witches October 9 from 10:30am-12pm | Central Library, Inland Northwest Special Collections

Lilac City Live! The Final Show October 16 @ 8pm | Central Library

The Great Pumpkin Festival: A Peanuts 75th Anniversary Event for Families October 18 @ 11am | Central Library

Demystifying Death: Legal Requirements and Final Planning October 22 @ 4pm | South Hill Library

Nerf War in the Upside Down for Middle and High Schoolers October 24 @ 6:30pm | Central Library

Living Fully, Dying Consciously October 29 @ 4pm | South Hill Library

Book Recommendations

Here are some other great horror titles to check out from your local library, most published within the last couple of years: