This week’s Top Ten Tuesday topic is:

(oops I set this to post a week early – this is for next week!. Oh well… it’s an early Halloween post then.)

It’s actually a Halloween freebie this week, and while I am not exactly much of a horror reader, I do enjoy dabbling in creepy reads once autumn sets in. So here are some of my favourite creepy reads of recent years, in no particular order – it’s a short list!

The Luminous Dead by Caitlin Starling

Oh this was so claustrophobic and tense and creepy. And amazingly it has just two characters and one setting – a cave.

Gideon the Ninth – Tamsyn Muir

I hesitate to qualify this as creepy but there are necromancers, witches, skeletons and it tends on the macabre yet it’s so funny and somehow made me feel so happy reading it. Does that sound weird? Not if you’ve read it (and loved it). Also, I am holding out before reading the second book, so don’t say anything about it!

Strange Practice (Greta Helsing #1) – Vivian Shaw

Greta Helsing is a doctor to the “differently alive” – vampires, ghouls, mummies etc. And while that alone is enough for me to go, oooh that sounds great, the book shines with all the other characters who are in it – a vampire, a vampyre, a demon, some ghouls.

The Deep by Alma Katsu (my thoughts here)

The Girl and the Ghost by Hanna Alkaf (my thoughts here)

This unapologetically Malaysian middle-grade book has just the right kind of spooky.

Anything that Joe Hill writes, really. Also, plus his awesome Locke and Key series – which when I passed to the husband to read (many years ago), he said, um this is a bit too morbid for me.

Top Ten Tuesday was created by The Broke and the Bookish in June of 2010 and was moved to That Artsy Reader Girl in January of 2018.