The Grimoire: 13 Spine-tingling Titles for Halloween 2024

This year’s collection of spine-tingling titles aims to spook you with unsettling discussions of dinosaurs, ghosts, cannibalism, necromancy, AI, your mom’s creepy new boyfriend, and more. Staff Writer Jen Rawlinson has trawled the depths to bring you the creepiest, crawliest, most blood-curdling books to chill you to your bones this Halloween season.

October 2, 2024

Poetics of the Paranormal

by Kevin Chabot

October 2024

“The appearance of ghosts in art and popular culture has transformed throughout history. From the undead corpse of the medieval tradition to the transparent forms of photographic film, to the infrared and thermal images that now populate reality television, the paranormal has literally changed shape over the centuries.

In Poetics of the Paranormal Kevin Chabot articulates the idea of spectrality, demonstrating how the paranormal is far from a stable, metaphysical category: it is a dynamic and historically contingent discourse, the contours of which shift over time. Specific media, Chabot argues, present the ghost in distinct ways that emphasize the ghostly qualities of the medium and, conversely, the technological qualities of the ghost. Through detailed analyses of nineteenth-century spirit photography, horror films, ghost-hunting reality television, and the viral internet phenomenon Slender Man, Chabot shows how the paranormal both shapes and is shaped by media.

Exploring key historical shifts in contemporary media while providing a rich and novel theoretical framework, Poetics of the Paranormal addresses with renewed rigour the relationships between media, perception, temporality, and the elusive concept of the evidential.”

William

by Mason Coile

September 2024

“Psychological horror meets cyber noir in this delicious one-sitting read – a haunted house story in which the haunting is by AI.

Henry is a brilliant engineer who, after untold hours spent in his home lab, has achieved the breakthrough of his career – he’s created an artificially intelligent consciousness. He calls the half-formed robot William.

No one knows about William. Henry’s agoraphobia keeps him inside the house, and his fixation on his project keeps him up in the attic, away from everyone, including his pregnant wife, Lily.

When Lily’s coworkers show up, wanting to finally meet Henry and see the new house – the smartest of smart homes – Henry decides to introduce them to William, and things go from strange to much worse. Soon Henry and Lily discover the security upgrades intended to keep danger out of the house are even better at locking it in.”

Supplication

by Nour Abi-Nakhoul

May 2024

“A hallucinatory horror novel set deeply in the consciousness of a woman exploring a changed and frightening world.

Our protagonist comes to in a basement, tied to a chair, with a man looming over her. But someone has a knife.

We follow her as she emerges from captivity into an unnamed, nightmarish city, seeking some meaning to her new reality. As figures emerge from the night, some offering sanctuary, and others judgement, she keeps moving, making her way through this fever dream of a narrative. Supplication is a haunting, embodied tale of alienation, fear, and the quest for respite.”

Calgary's Most Haunted: Urban Hauntings and Personal Encounters in Stampede City

by Ian Gibbs

October 2024

“In his newest collection of ghost stories, Ian Gibbs returns to Calgary, the city of his childhood, to reckon with its better- and lesser-known haunts, and the beginnings of his own sense of the supernatural.

Following on the success of his first two story collections, ghost-walk guide and host of the Ghosts ‘N Bears Podcast Ian Gibbs returns to Calgary, the city of his childhood, to reckon with his earliest experiences of the supernatural, corroborate some of the city’s better known hauntings – think Heritage Park, Fort Calgary, and the Stampede Grandstand – and uncover many more. These thirty stories range from heritage homes and official historic sites, to strip malls and suburban basements.

Along the way, Ian shares the beginnings of his sense of the paranormal, how he grew to trust his intuition, and relates conversations with friends old and new, whose outlook and experiences inform, alarm, and delight him.

With stops at some of Calgary’s most famous tourist destinations as well as a number of private properties, the book provides a conversational overview of the city’s history, including its original Indigenous inhabitants and early Hudson’s Bay days. Ian takes readers inside family mansions, churches, and more old sandstone schools than you can shake a stick at.”

The Dark King Swallows the World

by Robert G. Penner

October 2024

“While isolated and friendless in World War II Cornwall, Nora, a precocious American adolescent, loses her younger half-brother in a car crash. Overwhelmed by grief, Nora’s mother becomes involved with Olaf Winter, the self-professed necromancer Nora believes is responsible for the accident. Desperate to win back her mother’s love from the nefarious Mr. Winter, Nora embarks on an epic journey and is plunged into a world of faeries, giants, and homunculi. Eventually she reaches the land of the dead where she confronts the dark king who rules that realm, attempts to retrieve her half-brother, and heal her mother’s broken heart.”

The Queen

By Nick Cutter

October 2024

“On a sunny morning in June, Margaret Carpenter wakes up to find a new iPhone on her doorstep. She switches it on to find a text from her best friend, Charity Atwater. The problem is, Charity’s been missing for over a month. Most people in town – even the police – think she’s dead.

Margaret and Charity have been lifelong friends. They share everything, know the most intimate details about one another…except for the destructive secret hidden from them both. A secret that will trigger a chain of events ending in tragedy, bloodshed, and death. And now Charity wants Margaret to know her story – the real story. In a narrative that takes place over one feverish day, Margaret follows a series of increasingly disquieting breadcrumbs as she forges deeper into the mystery of her best friend – a person she never truly knew at all…”

The Cannibal

by Solomon Awa and Louise Flaherty, Illustrated by Raphael Ter-Stephanov

May 2024

“Based on an Inuit traditional story passed down orally for generations, The Cannibal tells the horrific tale of a family experiencing starvation when the animals they rely on for survival disappear. While the wife stays alive by eating plants she gathers daily, the husband does the unthinkable, resorting to murder and cannibalism. Horrified, and terrified for her life, the wife eventually finds herself alone in camp with her husband. She knows what will happen to her if she does not find a way to escape. Hatching a plan, the exhausted wife embarks on the journey with her murderous husband in pursuit. After safely arriving at a nearby camp, she shares the story of what has become of her camp, and her own children. Soon the husband arrives, and the camp must decide how to deal with the cannibal. Both horrific and poignant, this cautionary traditional story provides a window into the at times harsh realities of traditional life.”

Clever Girl: Jurassic Park

by Hannah McGregor

October 2024

“A smart and incisive exploration of everyone’s favorite dinosaur movie and the female dinosaurs who embody what it means to be angry, monstrous, and free

The Jurassic Park series is one of the most famous and profitable cinematic experiences of all time, with an entire generation of people who have never known life without these CGI dinosaurs. But while the movie spectacle broke film and merchandising records, pioneered special effects, and made Jeff Goldblum into an unlikely sex symbol, it has also been re-envisioned as a classic of queer feminist storytelling.

In Clever Girl, Hannah McGregor argues that the female-only dinosaurs of Jurassic Park are stand-ins for monstrous women, engineered by men to be intelligent, violent, and adaptive, and whose chaos resists the systems designed to control them. As they run wild through their prison, a profit-driven theme park, they destroy the men and structures who mistakenly believed in their own colonialist and capitalist power, showing the audience what it means to be angry, monstrous, and free. The velociraptors were not just jump scares for children, but also revelatory and predatory symbols of feminist rage. Clever girls, indeed.”

All You Can Kill

By Pasha Malla

October 2024

“White Lotus meets Shaun of the Dead in this absurdist take on the wellness retreat.

Our narrator and his accidental companion, K. Sohail, inadvertently find themselves on an island wellness retreat impersonating a couple, the Dhaliwals, who have probably been killed in a helicopter crash. After being welcomed by Jerome the robot, the new Dhaliwals eagerly partake of the all-you-stomach buffet, the motivational speechifyings on Trunity by the berobed Brad Beard, and some erotic counselling by Professor Sayer.

But things quickly take an ominous turn when an excursion to a nearby deserted village reveals a guillotine and a haunted chapel. And then one of the retreaters is murdered and the real Dhaliwals show up. Accusations, counter-accusations, and counter-counter-accusations are made, until the whole retreat is caught up in a bizarre trial.

In All You Can Kill, Pasha Malla, with his inimitable absurdist style, collides horror and humour into an utterly unforgettable satire.”

False Bodies

by J.R. McConvey

October 2024

“A genre-bending noir, and perhaps the squiddiest novel ever written, False Bodies creates a horror/thriller blend of the renowned Newfoundland culture seen in shows like Come From Away with the heart-pounding tension and creeping fear of Alien.

False Bodies follows monster hunter Eddie ‘The Yeti’ Gesner to Newfoundland, to investigate a mass death on an offshore oil rig – which some say is the work of a kraken. A mysterious incident in Eddie’s life has made him obsessed with chasing unfathomable things, but when an antique diary plunges him into a watery world of squid cults, tentacled beasts and corporate greed, Eddie finds even his own fractured reality pushed to the brink, as he’s forced to confront an undersea power beyond human imagining.”

Grey Dog

by Elliott Gish

April 2024

“A subversive literary horror novel that disrupts the tropes of women’s historical fiction with delusions, wild beasts, and the uncontainable power of female rage

The year is 1901, and Ada Byrd – spinster, schoolmarm, amateur naturalist – accepts a teaching post in isolated Lowry Bridge, grateful for the chance to re-establish herself where no one knows her secrets. She develops friendships with her neighbors, explores the woods with her students, and begins to see a future in this tiny farming community. Her past – riddled with grief and shame – has never seemed so far away.

But then, Ada begins to witness strange and grisly phenomena: a swarm of dying crickets, a self-mutilating rabbit, a malformed faun. She soon believes that something old and beastly – which she calls Grey Dog – is behind these visceral offerings, which both beckon and repel her. As her confusion deepens, her grip on what is real, what is delusion, and what is traumatic memory loosens, and Ada takes on the wildness of the woods, behaving erratically and pushing her newfound friends away. In the end, she is left with one question: What is the real horror? The Grey Dog, the uncontainable power of female rage, or Ada herself?”

Withered

by A.G.A. Wilmot

April 2024

“A queer paranormal horror novel in the style of showrunner Mike Flannagan, showing the complex real-life terror inherent in grief and mental illness

After the tragic death of their father and surviving a life-threatening eating disorder, 18-year-old Ellis moves with their mother to the small town of Black Stone, seeking a simpler life and some space to recover. But Black Stone feels off; it’s a disquieting place surrounded by towns with some of the highest death rates in the country. It doesn’t help that everyone says Ellis’s new house is haunted – everyone including Quinn, a local girl who has quickly captured Ellis’s attention. And Ellis has started to believe what people are saying: they see pulsing veins in their bedroom walls and specters in dark corners of the cellar. Together, Ellis and Quinn dig deep into Black Stone’s past and soon discover that their town, and Ellis’s house in particular, is the battleground in a decades-long spectral war, one that will claim their family – and the town – if it’s allowed to continue.

Withered is queer psychological horror, a compelling tale of heartache, loss, and revenge that tackles important issues of mental health in the way that only horror can: by delving deep into them, cracking them open, and exposing their gruesome entrails.”

Donner Parties: and other anti-social gatherings

by Keith Cadieux

September 2024

“In genre-bending fiction, Keith Cadieux’s collection of dark short stories set against the backdrop of terrifying events and using a narrative “frame/scenario”, this collection pushes various boundaries within the literary form and challenges artistic norms. These propulsive, linked stories by one of Manitoba’s most exciting emerging short story writers are gripping and taut, elevating short stories and genre fiction together.”