There’s little point waiting for it to get dark before cracking into a ghost story down here in Aotearoa – particularly in Dunedin, where I grew up and it doesn’t get dark at Halloween until at least eight thirty in the evening. Trick-or-treating is solely a daylight affair, and spring blossoms are more common than jack-o-lanterns.
But if you can keep your eyes open long enough, and leave the fridge door open for that realistic chilly breeze, we’ve got some delightfully dark and creepy stories to while away the long, light evenings this time of year. Read on for our top ghostly, ghastly and ghoulish picks from the Paper Road Press shelves.
Baby Teeth: Bite-sized Tales of Terror, edited by Dan Rabarts and Lee Murray, is a spine-chilling collection of tales about creepy children and the hapless adults who should have paid a bit more attention to what their little darlings were saying…
Buy the ebook: here
At the Edge, edited by Dan Rabarts and Lee Murray once again, is a feast of dark fantasy by authors from Aotearoa and Australia. With creeping chills and horrible thrills to whet any palate, this is the perfect book for your bedside table – or it might be better off hidden at the back of a cupboard. Your choice.
Buy the ebook: here
Buy the paperback: here
More haunting than horrifying – unless you find the prospect of your life’s work being used to snuff out countless lives particularly grim – Octavia Cade’s The Ghost of Matter weaves together science, history and the spectre of loss.
Ernest Rutherford is Aotearoa’s best-known scientist; in this novella, Cade draws on his life and work to create a piece of speculative history about the man who split the atom, the silences between, and the grief of broken things.
Buy the ebook: here
Buy the paperback: here
Andi V. Buchanan’s From a Shadow Grave is part ghost story, part urban fantasy, part alternate history, and all heartbreakingly wonderful. If you need some hope to cleanse your palate after this year, then From a Shadow Grave is the story for you.
Buy the ebook: here
Buy the paperback: here