Ooooooo..........spooky

It's almost Halloween and I find myself with a stack of horror and ghost stories to read.

Mwah hah hah hah...............

It's hard to beat a good haunted house story.
There's something about the potential ambiguity of that kind of book that draws me in. I'm a sucker for a well written unreliable narrator and some of the best ghost stories hover on that fine line between the imaginings of an unbalanced mind and some kind of outside supernatural influence.

Most recently I've read Shirley Jackson's The Haunting of Hill House. 
Written in 1959 it's a fantastic, creepy read with moments of black humour. Hill House is an eerie mansion with a murky history and bad reputation. Deliberately designed to confuse and discombobulate the inhabitants, a paramormal investigator has rented it with the intention of exploring the pyschic possibilities of the house. No prizes for guessing what happens next. Narrated by the emotionally fragile Eleanor it offers genuine chills and surprising monments of sarcastic humour and observation.
(See also - We Have Always Lived in the Castle by Shirley Jackson)

The book that put the real frightners on me was House of Leaves by Mark Z Danielewski.
I really shouldn't have stayed up all night on my own in the house finishing it.
Dawn never seemed so far away.
Once you get used to the way the book is structured - the srory unfolds through a wealth of purported found material - notebooks, interviews, documentary notes - the narrative becomes steadily more compelling until it's almost impossible to put down.
It's hard to describe how and why this book is so good. It's about a house. A really odd house. A house that seems to change it's architecture at will. Does it harbour malevolent intentions? Read it and find out.

The Little Stranger by Sarah Waters falls into that ambiguous category of ghost story. There are unexplained things that  happen - but the hows and whys are shrouded in mystery and speculation. Set in post war rural England, a doctor finds himself paying regular calls to Hundreds Hall - a stately home that's entered an irrevocble state of decline. As he gets acquanted with the family they ask for his help with the increasingly strange and worrying events that are happening in and around the house. An elegantly written spooky story with some chilling passages.

The Shining by Stepehn King technically features a haunted hotel rather than a house but let's not get bogged down by technicalities. Also a rather good, but slightly different film by Stanlye Kubrick, the original novel is well worth a read. The Torrance family is snowed into the isolated and empty hotel, deep in the Colarado mountains, where they've taken a seasonal job as custodians of the building. Jack Torrance is a recovering alcoholic who's grip on his own demons is gradually loosened through the long lonely winter and the malign influence of the building itself.

We'd love to know what YOUR favourite seasonally appropriate ghost stories are, so do let us know.