Suspiciously Specific Halloween Special - Creature Feature...

With exactly a week to go until Halloween, dark autumnal nights upon us, and the dregs of storm Austin howling outside my window tonight, I couldn't help but be inspired to bring you a Halloween Special edition of Suspiciously Specific. Today's theme is all about the creatures of the night. Of course, Goodreads, Storygraph, Reddit etc. are full of lists of horror-books that feature these specific creature-tropes. Instead of adding another list of famous best-sellers, I'm trying to stay true to my own brand of suspiciously specific recommendations and bring you some titles you may not have heard or thought of. You therefore won't find Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, Twilight or Nosferatu on this

list.

Without further ado, let's plunge ourselves into the shadows: 10 creatures of the night, 30 book recommendations, and hopefully enough nightmarefuel to burn you through the Halloween-nights...

Vampires

• Nestlings - Nat Cassidy Genre: horror A new mother discovers a residential cult of bloodsuckers in their appartment building...

• Brightsight - Peter Watts Genre: Science fiction horror Earth is invaded by a species that I can only describe as one of the most biologically accurate interpretation of vampires I've encountered in a long time...

• The Buffalo Hunter Hunter - Stephen Graham Jones

  Genre: horror

  a Blackfeet vampire recounts decades of violence, colonial brutality, and revenge in the American West.

Zombies

• One Yellow Eye - Leigh Radford Genre: science fiction a brilliant scientist desperately searches for a cure after a devastating epidemic while also hiding a monumental secret—her undead husband, chained to the radiator in her appartment.

• Elegy for the Undead - Matthew Vessley

  Genre: horror novella, queer lovestory an apocalyptically doomed love story about the final days of a queer couple as one of them succumbs to the effects of a zombie-bite.

• Lost in the Garden - Adam A. Leslie

  Genre: feverdream-horror, magical realism Three girls take a roadtrip across a sun-scorched haunted English countryside to a town that nobody returns from.

(Were-)wolfs and Canines

• Lycanthropy and Other Chronic Illnesses - Kristen O'Neal Genre: Young Adult Contemporary, Magical Realism A teen girl, recently diagnosed with a chronic illness, joins a Discord group of peers. When one of her online friends suddenly falls off the radar for seemingly health-related reasons, Priya reaches out to offer her help, only to find out that her friends illness isn’t quite what she expected it to be.

• Good Boy - Neil McRobert Genre: horror novella After a boy vanishes on the outskirts of a small Northern town, a woman spies from her window a mysterious man digging a grave in the exact spot of the disappearance. When she confronts him, the man's true purpose is far more chilling than she could have imagined and the history of the town’s fatal past unfolds.

• Sundial - Catriona Ward Genre: horror

  A troubled mother takes her eldest daughter to her own childhood home Sundial - a remove ranch in the Mojave desert - to make sure the traumatic past she’s buried there will stay buried for good.

Monsters

• A Monster Calls - Patrick Ness Genre: middle grade magical realism A young boy is visited at night by a monster at his window, who challenges him to confront the truth about his terminally ill mother.

• The Ritual - Adam Nevill Genre: folk horror Four old university friends reunite for a hiking trip in the Scandinavian wilderness of the Arctic Circle. Tired, cranky and with tensions among them rising, they take a shortcut that turns their hike into a nightmare that could cost them their lives.

• The Anomaly - Michael Rutger Genre: action/adventure horror

  A documentary crew retraces the steps of a historical explorer from 1909 who claimed to have discovered a mysterious cavern high up in the ancient rock of the Grand Canyon. What they find inside the cavern was more than they bargained for...

Ghosts

• Build Your House Around my Body - Violet Kupersmith Genre: historical fiction, magical realism The mysterious disappearance of a young Vietnamese American woman in Saigon intertwines with the fate of another woman who vanished decades earlier, as their stories unfold through ghosts, body possession, revenge, and Vietnam’s haunted history of colonialism and violence.

• The Haunting of Velkwood - Gwendolyn Kiste Genre: horror, magical realism The Velkwood Vicinity was the topic of occult theorists, tabloid one-hour documentaries, and even some pseudo-scientific investigations as the block of homes disappeared behind a near-impenetrable veil that only three survivors could enter—and only one has in the past twenty years, until now. A woman returns to the scene of an event that has haunted her for decades...

• The September House - Clarissa Orlando Genre: horror An elderly woman refuses to leave her house, despite the violent hauntings that take place every September, like clockwork...

Crows and Blackbirds

• Grief is the Thing with Feathers - Max Porter Genre: literary fiction, novel in verse A Ted-Hughes scholar and his two young sons are haunted by the spirit of a capricious crow in the wake of the sudden loss of their mother.

• An Impossibility of Crows - Kristen Kaschock Genre: magical realism, horror A grieving scientist returns to her childhood home after the death of her father, where she starts an irrational experiment: to breed a crow large and intelligent enough to carry her daughter to a freedom she has never known herself.

• Ashes of August Manor - Blaine Daigle Genre: horror A tragedy-ridden hospice worker with a unique connection to death, accepts a job caring for the dying patriarch of the reclusive August family at their lakefront manor just outside the town of Bell River, Oregon. She soon gets tangled in a web of dark and mysterious events.

Frankenstein-ean Resurrections

• One Yellow Eye - Leigh Radford Genre: science fiction A brilliant scientist desperately searches for a cure after a devastating epidemic while also hiding a monumental secret; her undead husband, chained to the radiator in her appartment...

• Eynhallow - Tim McGregor Genre: historical horror novella A stranger arrives on an isolated island off the Scottish shore; a mysterious doctor with a shadowed past by the name of Frankenstein. He takes a special interest in one of the local women, and a begrudging relationship forms between the two.

• Unwieldy Creatures - Addie Tsai Genre: magical realism, retelling A queer modern retelling of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, following a trio of perpectives: an intern at an embryology lab, a maverick professor of reproductive science, and non-binary person that was "the product" of his creations...

Witches

• Slewfoot - Brom Genre: fantasy

  A widowed outsider allies with an ancient horned forest spirit to save her farm. When the religiously fanatical villagers accuse her of witchcraft, their persecutiondrives her to embrace dark magic and unleash a bloody vengeance against her oppressors.

• Now She is Witch - Kirsty Logan Genre: fantasy Two young women find eachother on a journey for revenge, female rage, poisons and witchcraft.

• Hex - Thomas Olde Heuvelt Genre: horror A small village is terrorized by the local legend of a cursed witch's spirit. I have mixed feelings about this novel, but it will always have a special place for me, as the original Dutch version is set in a village very near where I grew up.

Cryptids

• The Barre Incidents - Lauren Bolger Genre: supernatural mystery, horror

  When Kara's miner father dies of Silicosis, she grapples with the old horror stories in their hometown of Barre, Vermont. Stories she insisted she didn't believe. A series of mysterious events convince her there might be more to these stories than she thought, and that her father might not be at peace...

• Mostly Human Resources - Grace Viall Genre: cozy fantasy

  An HR-worker at Entity, the company who categorise and manage the monsters and cryptids of the world, is forced into "fieldwork" when one of her coworkers goes missing on the job.

• Strange Animals - Jarod K. Anderson Genre: fantasy A down-on-his-luck man starts an apprenticeship with a centuries-old teacher in a remote Appalachian campsite, after he has his eyes opened to the existance of supernatural creatures in cryptids in modern America.

  

Killer-mermaids and Sirens

• The Burial Tide - Neil Sharpson Genre: folk horror A woman wakes up inside a wooden coffin six feet underground, with no memory of her identity or supposed “death”. She desperately claws her way to freedom, emerging on the frozen ground of Inishbannock - an island just off the coast of Ireland. Her search for answers leads her to an ancient myth, a secretlive community and a cycle repeating for decades...

• Chlorine - Jade Song Genre: horror A competitive swimmer, striving for perfection attempts to shape her body to stay afloat in the competition.

• All the Murmering Bones - A.G. Slatter Genre: fantasy A coastal community prospered due to a deal struck with the Mer: safety for their ships in return for a child of each generation. But for many years they have been unable to keep their side of the bargain and have fallen into decline. A toll must be paid...