Top 5 Wednesday: Halloween Reads

This week is one of my favorite of the year. The temperature is finally cool, if not quite cold. The change in the trees is amazing, and the bounty of a fall harvest is come home at last. The best part? Halloween is this Saturday! It is a great holiday, lots of fun, and we've got our own traditions in my home that I look forward to. My son's four now, so he's a good age to really get into things, particularly the trick or treating.

This week for Top 5 Wednesday I've got five reads for you that would be ideal for the Halloween season.

The Box by Richard Matheson

This short story is very creep and asks you a terrifying question: how well do we really know anyone, even those closest to us? The ending will leave you with a chill.

One Day at Horrorland by R.L. Stine

I read a lot of the Goosebumps books as a child and this one was my absolute favorite. Imagine the best amusement park in the world...and then imagine that it exists only in your nightmares. This book is a lot of fun and works particularly well for the nostalgia factor.

The Monkey's Paw by W.W. Jacobs

This story will teach you an important lesson: be careful what you wish for. Whenever I think about what it would be like to have wishes, this is one of the stories that I remember and it reminds me: it is ALL about phrasing your wish and thinking it out. Same goes for if you're dealing with Faeries.

One of my favorites animes, xxxHolic, had an episode based around this legend that illustrates what happens when you think you can beat the power of the Monkey's paw.

It's the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown by Charles M. Schulz

For those of you out there with children, this title is one of my favorites to read to my son. I loved Snoopy and the gang growing up and I've been trying to get my son interested in them as well. The Christmas special is my favorite of the lot, but Linus's faith and belief in the Great Pumpkin really touches me in this story.

Demon in My View by Amelia Atwater-Rhodes

This is the second book in the Den of Shadows series and is my favorite, I think. It has some of the same characters from the first book, In the Forest of the Night. It tells the story of Jessica, a teenager at odds with her classmates. She is an author whose debut book has just been released, though no one at her school knows it. It's a novel chock full of vampires and their goings on. What Jessica doesn't realize, however, is that all of her characters are real.

A fast read, Demon in My View is something that I would have dreamed about as a teenager and still love revisiting to this day.







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