10 Scariest Summer-Based Horror Novels Ever
Books that'll make you turn OFF the lights.
Summer-based horror stories are the novels you yearn to seek out, the ones that whisk you back to simpler times, where summer days felt endless and the smell of cut grass lingered in your nostrils - but you don’t quite know how to articulate this to Google. Plots follow a well-trodden path - youngsters facing an evil force or a town coming under threat are your usual tropes – but over the years writers have used these templates to explore issues ranging from the pains of adolescence to the decline of modernist values.
The main thing these forthcoming books have in common is that they play out during summer, a time where the only thing that can go wrong is you get grounded for staying out past curfew, or the local multiplex manager boots you out for slinking into an adult-rated movie.
But the seasonal images these stories conjure up are masking a lurking evil; these are worlds where a vapor trail in the sky could just as well be a slice across a jugular and that neighbour who holds your parcels might be hiding leathery skin beneath that starch-collared exterior. Nothing is what it seems.
So, forget Stoker-esque castles or dusty drawing rooms and discover ten tales that make you dread reading in your backyard.
10. The Scarecrow Walks At Midnight - R.L. Stine
From The Werewolves Of Fever Swamp to Deep Trouble, no other author has cottoned on to the terrors that a summer’s day can yield quite like R. L. Stine. With The Scarecrow Walks At Midnight, the twentieth entry in his mega-selling series of Goosebumps novellas, the author surpasses himself.
Taking a cue from Scary Stories To Tell In The Dark’s ‘Harold’, the story starts out serenely as siblings Jodie and Mark go to visit their grandparents’ farm, out in Sticksville, USA, but soon cotton on that the surrounding scarecrows are doing more than just giving birds the heebie jeebies. Like all other ‘Bumps stories, each chapter eases you in and a central mystery starts to unravel, which in this case points to some genetic engineering taking place.
What makes this Stine’s strongest entry is his way of describing these sun-tinged rural surroundings, the subtlety of his scares (scarecrows swaying in the wind, or are they?) and that overall feeling of dread it instils in what should be the most humdrum of surroundings.