Lindsay's spooktober 2021 reading list

When the nights start to close in there's nothing better than curling up with horror book and losing yourself in the dark atmosphere of a well-told tale. Spooktober never ends for me, so here's a few of my favourite creepy reads that have kept me up in the past year...

My top pick this year has to be The Dangers of Smoking in Bed; a slow-burn collection of short stories infused with a building sense of dread throughout.

I loved Alien: The Cold Forge, a gripping and terrifying sci-fi thriller with great characters and a queer (non-binary) edge that surprised me for a big franchise.

Tender is the Flesh chilled me to the core, the horror lying not in the extreme gore of a world driven by cannibalism (although there is plenty of that) but in the banal normalisation of the characters living in this awful reality.

The Stars Are Legion is one of the grossest stories I've ever read; a lesbian biopunk space opera set in giant living space-leviathans, where every piece of technology is cronenbergian body horror. Amazing.

You also need to check out A Dowry of Blood because we all need more poly vampire dracula's bride stories in our lives; and Ring Shout because we love to see the kkk (who also happen to be literally cosmic horror monsters) get taken out by kickass resistance fighters.