October at the Beach & Spine Tingling Tales
Dive into October at the Beach with a Spooky Book
Embrace the chilling embrace of October at the beach with a spine-tingling read! Nestled in a cozy spot by the 30A coastline with crashing waves providing an eerie backdrop to your creepy tale. The sea breeze will send shivers down your spine as you dive into the pages of a suspenseful, scary book. It’s the perfect setting to immerse yourself in a world of ghosts, ghouls, and mysteries waiting to unravel. So, pack your book, grab a warm drink, and let the beach become your haunted haven this October.
For those who live and breathe the horror genre, Halloween reigns supreme as the ultimate holiday on the calendar. Like clockwork, society at large once a year celebrates the eerie and uncanny—even spine-tingling fungal horrors.
We’ve curated a selection of spine-tingling books, both beloved classics and fresh releases, perfect for indulging during your beach getaway. Prepare to immerse yourself in a world of horror and suspense that seamlessly blends the mysterious ambiance of October with the sun and sand of your beach vacation.
The Southern Book Club’s Guide to Slaying Vampires by Grady Hendrix
Fried Green Tomatoes and Steel Magnolias meet Dracula in this Southern-flavored supernatural thriller set in the ’90s about a women’s book club that must protect its suburban community from a mysterious and handsome stranger who turns out to be a blood-sucking fiend.
Patricia Campbell had always planned for a big life. Still, after giving up her career as a nurse to marry an ambitious doctor and become a mother, Patricia’s life has never felt smaller. The one thing she has to look forward to is her book club, a group of Charleston mothers united only by their love for true crime and suspenseful fiction. But when an artistic and sensitive stranger moves into the neighborhood, the book club’s meetings turn into speculation about the newcomer and her book club–are the only people standing between the monster they’ve invited into their homes and their unsuspecting community.
Home Before Dark by Riley Sager
Maggie Holt is used to such questions. Twenty-five years ago, she and her parents, Ewan and Jess, moved into Baneberry Hall, a rambling Victorian estate in the Vermont woods. They spent three weeks there before fleeing in the dead of night, an ordeal Ewan later recounted in a nonfiction book called House of Horrors. His tale of ghostly happenings and encounters with evil spirits became a worldwide phenomenon, rivaling The Amityville Horror in popularity—and skepticism.
Today, Maggie is a restorer of old homes and too young to remember any of the events mentioned in her father’s book. But she also doesn’t believe a word of it. Ghosts, after all, don’t exist. When Maggie inherits Baneberry Hall after her father’s death, she returns to renovate the place to prepare it for sale. But her homecoming is anything but warm. People from the past, chronicled in House of Horrors, lurk in the shadows and she starts to believe that what he wrote is more fact than fiction.
The Darkest Hour by Ashley Winstead
It follows Ruth Cornier, a librarian who has always felt like an outsider in her small hometown. Unfortunately for Ruth, the only things the townspeople fear more than God and the Devil are the myths that haunt the area. When a skull is found deep in the swamp next to mysterious carved symbols, Ruth realizes only she and Everett, an old friend with a dark past, have the power to comb the town’s secret underbelly in search of true evil.
The Family Meal by Brian Washington
It is not a spine-tingler, nor scary, but a great Novel, so we added it to the list! Family Meal is a story about how the people who know us the longest can hurt us the most, but they also set the standard for love.
The Girls Weekend By Jodi Gehrman
The Girls Weekend is a 336-page novel by Jody Gehrman. It’s a locked-room mystery about five college friends who reunite after years apart. The reunion is interrupted when the host disappears, unearthing dark secrets and old grudges.
One Night in Salem
Throngs of tourists pack the streets from Derby to Essex. Costumed children and adults visit haunted attractions and browse t-shirt shops and street vendors’ booths. A veiled figure appears, and you catch her out of the corner of your eye, but she quickly disappears into the crowd… or perhaps into thin air? The night is filled with laughter and screams as the living walk shoulder to shoulder with the dead. Halloween in Salem has expanded into a month-long celebration of all things creepy. Still, in four hundred years of history, October 31st has held many mysterious customs and dark events, lost and forgotten in the passing of decades.
As you soak up the sun and listen to the gentle lapping of waves, let these chilling tales transport you into the spirit of October, creating unforgettable beachside memories that will stay with you long after the summer season fades away.