Love Spooky TV shows? 10 Haunting Halloween Books You Can’t Miss

The TV vibe: Childhood friendships, terrifying creatures, old mysteries and the disturbing realization that maybe the monster you encountered years ago was real after all.

Stranger Things officially concluded with its fifth season, released across three dates beginning November 26, 2025, with the finale arriving December 31 in the United States. Netflix later reported that Season 5 drew 94 million views during the second half of 2025.

Your book doppelganger: Meddling Kids by Edgar Cantero.

Years after a group of young amateur detectives solved their final case, the now-grown friends return to the mystery that has continued to haunt them. This time, they begin to suspect that what happened wasn’t nearly as ordinary as they were led to believe.
That combination of childhood adventure and grown-up cosmic horror makes Meddling Kids a wonderfully weird companion for readers missing Hawkins.

Perfect for readers who want: found family, monsters, nostalgia, mystery and cosmic horror.

The TV vibe: Seductive immortality, beautiful monsters, toxic devotion and vampires who have absolutely no intention of quietly hiding in a coffin.

AMC premiered The Vampire Lestat on June 7, 2026. The latest chapter of its Anne Rice universe reinvents Lestat as a modern rock star while characters and memories from his past continue to haunt him.

Your book doppelganger: A Dowry of Blood by S.T. Gibson.

Inspired by the brides of Dracula, Gibson’s novel turns vampirism into an intimate gothic story about desire, control, obsession and the dangerous imbalance between an immortal creator and the people drawn into his orbit.
If the glamorous, destructive relationships are what keep you watching Lestat, this should move very close to the top of your Halloween TBR.

Perfect for readers who want: decadent vampires, gothic romance, obsession, betrayal and morally questionable immortals.

The TV vibe: A haunted home, a deeply damaged family and the uncomfortable possibility that living with ghosts may be easier than confronting your family history.

Netflix describes Mike Flanagan’s 2018 The Haunting of Hill House as a modern reimagining of Shirley Jackson’s famous novel, following siblings forced to confront both their traumatic past and the ghosts connected to their childhood home.

Your book doppelganger: The September House by Carissa Orlando.

Margaret has her dream house. Unfortunately, the walls bleed every September, ghosts wander through the rooms and something considerably worse lurks in the basement.
She refuses to move.
When her husband disappears and her daughter arrives looking for answers, maintaining the strange domestic arrangement becomes increasingly difficult.
The premise can be darkly funny, but underneath it is a story about family, denial, trauma and what people learn to treat as “normal.” That makes it an especially strong companion read for fans of Flanagan’s family-centered horror.

Perfect for readers who want: haunted houses, dysfunctional families, ghosts, dark humor and domestic horror.

The TV vibe: Wealthy families, beautiful houses with terrible secrets, decay beneath luxury and the creeping certainty that absolutely everyone should have left this place several chapters ago.

Netflix’s 2023 limited series The Fall of the House of Usher comes from Hill House creator Mike Flanagan and draws from the works of Edgar Allan Poe. It follows the wealthy Usher dynasty as its heirs begin dying under increasingly horrific circumstances.

Your book doppelganger: Mexican Gothic by Silvia Moreno-Garcia.

After receiving a disturbing letter from her newly married cousin, Noemí Taboada travels to an isolated mansion in the Mexican countryside. Waiting for her is an aristocratic family, an unsettling house and a mystery that becomes considerably stranger the deeper she digs.
Both stories are fascinated by dynasties that look powerful from the outside while something rotten spreads underneath.

Perfect for readers who want: gothic mansions, family secrets, body horror, sinister wealth and slow-building dread.

The TV vibe: Powerful witches, dangerous rivalries, sisterhood, old grudges and the intoxicating question of what happens when women discover just how much power they possess.

American Horror Story: Coven originally aired from October 2013 to January 2014 as the third installment of FX’s American Horror Story.

Set largely in New Orleans, the season follows a group of young witches at Miss Robichaux’s Academy as they contend with threats from inside and outside their coven.

The season remains one of the franchise’s most recognizable witch-centered stories, mixing historical figures, supernatural horror and the battle to determine the coven’s next Supreme.

Your book doppelganger: The Once and Future Witches by Alix E. Harrow.

Set in an alternate 1893, the novel follows the estranged Eastwood sisters as they reunite in New Salem and become involved in the women’s suffrage movement. In their world, witchcraft has largely disappeared — but the sisters begin searching for the old words and ways that could bring women’s magic back.
This isn’t Coven in book form. Instead, it captures many of the ingredients that make a witch story irresistible: complicated women, sisterhood, forbidden magic, persecution, ambition and power that comes with consequences.
If your favorite AHS season involved witches refusing to stay powerless, this belongs on your Halloween reading list.

Perfect for readers who want: witches, sisterhood, historical fantasy, feminist themes, forbidden magic and women taking back their power.

The TV vibe: Witchcraft, dark forests, religious terror, occult rituals and a heroine caught between the world she’s expected to obey and something much darker calling her name.

Netflix’s Chilling Adventures of Sabrina premiered in October 2018 and concluded with Part 4 on December 31, 2020.

The series offered a much darker interpretation of Sabrina Spellman than the character’s earlier television incarnation, surrounding its teenage witch with occult horror, sinister institutions and increasingly dangerous supernatural forces.

Your book doppelganger: Slewfoot: A Tale of Bewitchery by Brom.

Set in 1666 New England, the novel follows Abitha, a young woman struggling to survive within a rigid Puritan community. In the nearby forest, however, an ancient presence is awakening.
Is it a demon? A spirit? Something else entirely?
And perhaps more importantly: what happens when a woman who has been given very little power discovers something capable of changing that?
Slewfoot is considerably more adult and brutal than Sabrina, but that’s what makes it such a delicious Halloween follow-up. It has Puritan fear, accusations of witchcraft, religious oppression, mysterious creatures and a dark relationship between a woman and the supernatural.

Perfect for readers who want: witches, folk horror, dark forests, occult imagery, revenge and a genuinely sinister Halloween atmosphere.

The TV vibe: A devastated world, terrifying infected humans, desperate survivors and a child who may completely change what humanity believes about the infection destroying it.

HBO’s The Last of Us premiered in January 2023, adapting the acclaimed Naughty Dog video game. Its second season premiered in April 2025 and continued Joel and Ellie’s story five years after the events of Season 1.

At the center of the show’s apocalypse is a mutated Cordyceps fungus that has devastated civilization — but the emotional heart of the story comes from the people attempting to survive what remains.

Your book doppelganger: The Girl with All the Gifts by M. R. Carey.

Melanie is an exceptionally intelligent young girl. She attends lessons, loves learning and thinks carefully about the adults around her.
She is also kept under extraordinary security.
Carey’s novel gradually reveals a world devastated by a fungal infection and asks increasingly uncomfortable questions about the infected, the survivors and what the future of humanity might actually look like.
The fungal-apocalypse connection makes this an obvious recommendation for The Last of Us fans, but the similarities run deeper. Both stories use horror to explore humanity, survival and our instinct to fear something simply because it represents a future we don’t understand.

Perfect for readers who want: fungal horror, post-apocalyptic survival, infected humans, emotional storytelling and difficult moral choices.

The TV vibe: Girls pushed beyond the boundaries of civilized behavior, survival, secrets, shifting alliances and the increasingly uncomfortable question of whether the supernatural is actually responsible for what’s happening.

Showtime’s Yellowjackets premiered in November 2021, following members of a girls’ high-school soccer team after their plane crashes in the wilderness. The story moves between their fight for survival in the 1990s and the lives of the survivors decades later.

Season 3 premiered in February 2025, continuing the series’ mixture of survival drama, psychological horror and mystery.

Your book doppelganger: The Grace Year by Kim Liggett.

In Tierney James’s world, sixteen-year-old girls are believed to possess a dangerous power capable of tempting men and destroying marriages. Each year, the girls are banished into the wilderness for their so-called grace year before those who survive are allowed to return.
What follows is a story about isolation, fear, violence and what happens when a group of girls realizes that surviving each other may be as difficult as surviving the wilderness.
That’s exactly where the Yellowjackets comparison becomes irresistible.
Both stories strip away ordinary society and place young women in environments where rules begin to collapse. Alliances matter. Fear spreads. Violence changes people. And the line separating supernatural danger from human cruelty becomes increasingly difficult to identify.

Perfect for readers who want: female survival stories, wilderness horror, paranoia, dangerous group dynamics and girls going absolutely feral.

The TV vibe: You’re trapped. You don’t understand the rules. Something terrifying comes out after dark. And every answer seems to create three more questions.

MGM+’s From premiered in February 2022 with a nightmare of a premise: people who enter a mysterious town discover that they cannot leave.

Worse, frightening creatures emerge from the surrounding forest at night.

The show’s combination of mystery-box storytelling, monsters and an apparently inescapable location has made figuring out what is really happening almost as important as surviving it.

Your book doppelgänger: The Watchers by A. M. Shine.

Mina becomes stranded near an isolated forest in Ireland and eventually finds shelter with a group of strangers.
There is one major problem.
Every night, mysterious creatures arrive to watch them.
The people inside must follow rules they don’t fully understand while attempting to survive long enough to discover exactly what is lurking beyond their shelter.
For From fans, the appeal should be immediate: trapped strangers, mysterious creatures, nighttime terror and a place whose rules seem to matter even when nobody understands why.
The Watchers was also adapted into a feature film released in 2024, but the original novel gives horror readers the opportunity to experience Shine’s unsettling premise on the page.

Perfect for readers who want: trapped characters, mysterious rules, monsters in the woods, claustrophobic horror and mysteries that keep getting stranger.