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Beetlejuice, has a lot of dead time waiting around for his besties in Winter River to open another portal to the mortal world.
To help kill the hours, he’s curated a sack full of spooky reads that he’s dying to get through.
The Juice’s TBR is filled with books about demons, ghosts, and all things haunted – perfect for a bio-exorcist with a knack for the macabre. Beetlejuice knows where to find the darkest tales that promise chills, thrills, and maybe a few laughs along the way.
Whether it’s a spine-tingling ghost story, or an exploration of otherworldly realms, Beetlejuice has an eye for the kind of books that make even the bravest shiver.
So, if you’re looking for a recommendation, this list from Beetlejuice’s TBR stack is sure to leave you haunted long after the last page.
Series or Standalone?:
This is a standalone collection.
"Haunted: Ghost Stories and Their Afterlives" Book Blurb:
E. Jay Gilbert has been collecting tales of the supernatural from her local area (a small village outside of Newcastle) for years. What surprised her most is how universal those stories are, not only in terms of recurring spectres that haunt us the world over (I’m looking at you, White Ladies), but also how similar our experience of ghost-telling is, wherever we grew up. The result is a book which explores more widely the ghosts of the British Isles and how they have endured and changed, how they reflect the communities in which they originate, and how they are similar to and different from similar stories from across the world. ‘Haunted’ doesn’t just thrill with the tales of the inexplicable, but also asks why are we so fascinated by ghost stories and what do they tell us about the community and people who cultivate them. Why are some tropes universal, while others are very much unique to the place they haunt? Do we actually care about the identity of the ghost? Or are we more concerned about how the alleged sighting made us feel?
Grab yourself a copy:
‘Haunted: Ghost Stories and Their Afterlives’ by E. Jay Gilbert
Series or Standalone? :
This is a standalone novel.
"A Haunting in the Arctic" Book Blurb:
On board the Ormen, a whaling ship battling through the unforgiving North Sea, Nicky Duthie awakes. Attacked and dragged there against her will, it’s just her and the crew – and they’re all owed something only she can give them. Decades later, when the ship is found still drifting across the ocean, it’s deserted. Just one body is left on board, his face and feet mutilated, his cabin locked from the inside. Everyone else has vanished. Now, as urban explorer Dominique travels into the near-permanent darkness of the northernmost tip of Iceland, to the final resting place of the Ormen’s wreck, she’s determined to uncover the ship’s secrets. But she’s not alone. Something is here with her. And it’s seeking revenge.
Grab yourself a copy:
Series or Standalone? :
This is a standalone novel.
"Ghostland: In Search of a Haunted Country" Book Blurb:
In his late thirties, Edward Parnell found himself trapped in the recurring nightmare of a family tragedy. For comfort, he turned to his bookshelves, back to the ghost stories that obsessed him as a boy, and to the writers through the ages who have attempted to confront what comes after death. In ‘Ghostland’, Parnell goes in search of the ‘sequestered places’ of the British Isles, our lonely moors, our moss-covered cemeteries, our stark shores and our folkloric woodlands. He explores how these landscapes conjured and shaped a kaleidoscopic spectrum of literature and cinema, from the ghost stories and weird fiction of M. R. James, Arthur Machen and Algernon Blackwood to the children’s fantasy novels of Alan Garner and Susan Cooper; from W. G. Sebald’s ‘The Rings of Saturn’ and Graham Swift’s ‘Waterland’ to the archetypal folk horror film ‘The Wicker Man’.
Grab yourself a copy:
‘Ghostland: In Search of a Haunted Country’ by Edward Parnell
Series or Standalone? :
This is a standalone novel.
"The Haunting of Alejandra" Book Blurb:
Alejandra no longer knows who she is. To her husband she is a wife, and to her children a mother. To her own adoptive mother, she is a daughter. But they cannot see who Alejandra has become: a woman struggling with a darkness that threatens to consume her. Nor can they see what Alejandra sees. In times of despair, a ghostly vision appears to her, the apparition of a crying woman in a ragged white gown. When Alejandra visits a therapist she begins exploring her family’s history, beginning with the biological mother she never knew. And as she goes deeper into the lives of the women in her family, she learns that heartbreak and tragedy are not the only things she has in common with her ancestors. Because the crying woman was with them, too. She is La Llorona, the vengeful and murderous mother of Mexican legend. And she will not leave until Alejandra follows her mother, her grandmother, and all of the women who came before her, into the darkness. But Alejandra has inherited more than just pain. She has inherited the strength and the courage of her foremothers – and she will have to summon everything they have given her to banish La Llorona forever.
Grab yourself a copy:
Series or Standalone? :
This is a standalone novel.
"The Haunting of Velkwood" Book Blurb:
The Velkwood Vicinity was the topic of occult theorists, tabloid one-hour documentaries, and even some pseudo-scientific investigations as the block of homes disappeared behind a near-impenetrable veil that only three survivors could enter—and only one has in the past twenty years, until now. Talitha Velkwood has avoided anything to do with the tragedy that took her mother and eight-year-old sister, drifting from one job to another, never settling anywhere or with anyone, feeling as trapped by her past as if she was still there in the small town she so desperately wanted to escape from. When a new researcher tracks her down and offers to pay her to come back to enter the vicinity, Talitha claims she’s just doing it for the money. Of all the crackpot theories over the years, no one has discovered what happened the night Talitha, her estranged, former best friend Brett, and Grace, escaped their homes twenty years ago. Will she finally get the answers she’s been looking for all these years, or is this just another dead end?
Grab yourself a copy:
Series or Standalone? :
This is a standalone novel.
"Hauntings: A Book of Ghosts and Where to Find Them" Book Blurb:
Oliver travels the British Isles to explore the history of its most haunted places and and unpick why these houses, landmarks and other eerie places are so unsettling. For longer than recorded history there have been tales of spirits and of places where our hackles rise and our skin turns cold. Bestselling historian Neil Oliver travels the British Isles on a deliciously spine-chilling tour that spans several centuries and explores more than 20 sites – castles, vicarages and towers, lonely shorelines and forgotten battlefields – to unpick their stories. Oliver invokes his family’s history alongside that of kings and queens past as he probes why our emotions and senses are heightened in certain locations where the separation between dimensions seems gossamer thin. Our landscape is riven with these places, creaking from the weight of the secrets they hold, the echoes of tragedy and dark deeds .
Grab yourself a copy:‘Hauntings: A Book of Ghosts and Where to Find Them’ by Neil Oliver
Series or Standalone? :
This is Book One in the ‘Prosper’s Demon’ series.
"Prosper's Demon" Book Blurb:
An exorcist’s methods aren’t delicate but they’re undeniably effective: he’ll get the demon out-he just doesn’t particularly care what happens to the person. His target, Prosper of Schanz is a man of science, determined to raise the world’s first philosopher-king, reared according to the purest principles. Too bad he’s possessed. In this pitch dark witty fantasy, Parker deftly creates a world with vivid, unbending rules, seething with demons, broken faith, and bad men. Prosper’s Demon cheerfully and acidly excavates some of Western literature’s deepest tropes-from Plato’s Philosopher King to Marlowe and Goethe on Doctor Faustus and Mephistopheles-with infernal flair.
Grab yourself a copy:
Series or Standalone? :
This is a standalone novel.
"The Good Demon" Book Blurb:
It wasn’t technically an exorcism, what they did to Clare. When the reverend and his son ripped her demon from her, they called it a deliverance. But they didn’t understand that Clare and her demon-known simply as Her – were like sisters. She comforted Clare, made her feel brave, helped to ease her loneliness. They were each other’s Only. Now, Clare’s only comforts are the three clues that She left behind: Be nice to him. June 20. Remember the stories. Clare will do anything to get Her back, even if it means teaming up with the reverend’s son and scouring every inch of her small, Southern town for answers. But if she sacrifices everything to bring back her demon, what will be left of Clare?
Grab yourself a copy:
Series or Standalone? :
This is a standalone novel.
"The Spider and Her Demons" Book Blurb:
Moving and funny by turns, this is a story about what it takes to make peace with your demons – literal or otherwise. An urban fantasy spin on growing up as a second-generation immigrant, struggling under the overwhelming pressure to make others proud, while feeling trapped inside your own body. Between surviving high school and working at her aunt’s dumpling shop, all Zhi wants is to find time for her friends … and make sure no one finds out she’s half spider-demon. But when she accidentally kills and eats a man in front of the most popular girl in school, she discovers she might not be the scariest thing in the shadows.
Grab yourself a copy:
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