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player ready...It’s officially fall, and that means pumpkin spice lattes, sweater weather and, most importantly, spooky season!
As part of this year’s Amazing Book Challenge and with the expert help of our librarians, we invite you to crack open some terrifying tales and let your imagination run wild with these six spine-tingling stories.
The Amazing Book Challenge encourages adult and teen readers to broaden their reading interests by discovering new subjects, series or authors. Readers are encouraged to choose 12 books throughout the year from 12 different categories. This month, pull up and chair and choose a book that will make you want to sleep with the lights on.
For the full list of Amazing Book Challenge categories, visit www.naperville-lib.org/ABC.
“The Burning Girls” by C.J. Tudor
Welcome to Chapel Croft. Five hundred years ago, eight Protestant martyrs were burned at the stake here. Thirty years ago, two teenage girls disappeared without a trace. Rev. Jack Brooks and his daughter, Flo, arrive in the village hoping for a fresh start and some peace, but the more Jack and Flo get acquainted with the town and its strange denizens, the deeper they are drawn into their rifts, mysteries and suspicions. Uncovering the truth can be deadly in a village where everyone has something to protect, everyone has links with the village’s bloody past and no one trusts an outsider.
“Summer Sons” by Mandelo Lee
Andrew and Eddie did everything together, until Eddie left Andrew behind to start a graduate program at Vanderbilt University. Six months later, Eddie dies of an apparent suicide. He leaves Andrew a horrible inheritance: a roommate he doesn’t know, friends he never asked for and a gruesome phantom that hungers for him. As Andrew searches for the truth of Eddie’s death, he uncovers the lies and secrets left behind by the person he trusted most. The walls Andrew has built against the world begin to crumble. And there is something awful lurking, waiting for those walls to fall.
“We Keep the Dead Close” by Becky Cooper
The year 1969 is the year in which universities would seek to curb the unruly spectacle of student protest, Harvard University began the process of merging with its all-female sister school and the year that Jane Britton, an ambitious 23-year-old graduate student would be found bludgeoned to death in her apartment. Forty years later, undergrad Becky Cooper will hear the first whispers of her story. “We Keep the Dead Close” is a memoir of mirrors, misogyny and murder. It is at once a rumination on the violence and oppression that rules our revered institutions, a ghost story reflecting one young woman’s past onto another’s present and a love story for a girl who was lost to history.
“The Cloisters” by Katy Hays
Ann Stilwell arrives in New York City to work at The Cloisters, a gothic museum renowned for its collection of medieval and Renaissance art. There she is drawn into a small circle of researchers, each with their own secrets and desires, including the museum’s curator, Patrick Roland, who is convinced the history of Tarot holds the key to unlocking contemporary fortune telling. When Ann discovers a mysterious, once-thought-lost deck of 15th-century Italian tarot cards, she suddenly finds herself at the center of a dangerous game of power, toxic friendship and ambition. And as the game being played within the Cloisters spirals out of control, Ann must decide whether she is truly able to defy the cards and shape her own future.
“The Hollow Places” by T. Kingfisher
“The Twisted Ones. Pray they are hungry.” Kara finds these words in the mysterious bunker that she’s discovered behind a hole in the wall of her uncle’s house. Freshly divorced and living back at home, Kara now becomes obsessed with these cryptic words and starts exploring this peculiar area, only to discover it holds portals to countless alternate realities. But these places are haunted by creatures that seem to hear thoughts … and the more one fears them, the stronger they become.
“The Return” by Rachel Harrison
Julie is missing, and the missing don’t often return. But Elise knows Julie will one day return. Two years to the day that Julie went missing, she reappears with no memory of where she’s been or what happened to her. Along with their two close friends from college, the women decide to reunite. But the second Elise sees Julie, she knows something is wrong — she’s emaciated, with sallow skin, chipped teeth and odd appetites. When bad weather traps them inside their hotel, tensions flare. Elise begins to hear scratching in the walls, to see the slither of shadows cast by nothing. And as the weekend unfurls, it becomes impossible to deny that the Julie who vanished two years ago is not the same Julie who came back. But who — or what — is she?
Ashlee Conour is the marketing specialist at Naperville Public Library.