By Amy Wang | The Oregonian/OregonLive: This Halloween season, trick or treat yourself with these titles, nearly all by authors with Oregon ties. The Oddmire, Book 1: Changeling (Algonquin Young Readers, 272 pages, $16.95) Having established major monster cred with the wry young-adult “Jackaby” trilogy, about a 19th-century New England detective who specializes in paranormal …
Sometimes you need a dose of something spooky, and few deliver like Jackson. This book gripped me from the opening line and didn’t let me go until the last. I read it all night, thought about it all day, and then read it some more. Mary Catherine and her sister Constance are hiding a sordid …
When are scarecrows truly creepy? When it is close to Halloween! And– when they stalk children and seem to have been making people disappear for over a hundred years. But I get ahead of myself. Eleven-year-old Ollie finds a distraught woman threatening to throw a book into a raging river. Ollie saves (steals) the book …
Autumn has finally arrived here in the Northwest corner, sneaking up on us perhaps because so much of October was dressed up in summer-like weather, but it’s still the perfect time to look back at some favorite reads from the summer just passed. Lining them all up, it seems that although I didn’t actually get …
Having seen the trailer for the upcoming movie with the same title, I learned it was a book first published in 1973. A great yarn filled with spooky and magical elements that many 8-12-year-olds love to read. Lewis Barnavelt, an orphan, comes to live with his uncle Jonathan and discovers a world totally new to …
How about some fairy tale horror set in Colonial New England? In Laird Hunt’s In the House in the Dark of the Woods, we have the story of a woman named Goody, who goes out one day to pick berries. Naturally, she stays out after dark and gets lost. But she gets found by a …
If you are looking for a good contemporary novel with a touch of Gothic horror, then this book is for you. As in her first novel, The Essex Serpent, Perry’s tale revolves around an old legend which seemingly comes to life. Helen’s life is forever changed at a coffee shop in Prague, when her friend …
This is a book about family secrets and a ghost. Not new ideas, certainly, but Stein’s story of a young boy returning to the family mansion with his dad during a trial separation from his mother is, at times, gut-wrenching in the discomfort that dredging up the past brings. And this family has a particularly …
CONGRATULATIONS to our Neil Gaiman signed poster winner, Jess! Favorite spooky read: I just read Through the Woods by Emily Carroll and not only are her illustrations amazing, the stories were actually spooky for me! Favorite bookstore: Third Place Books in Lake Forest Park. I can spend hours wandering their shelves! -Jess Thank you to …
