October 2026 TBR!!

In the words of Beetlejuice, “It’s showtime!” It’s my favorite time of year and I absolutely plan to celebrate it. Let’s start the party off with my October 2026 TBR.

Dark Hallows

Synopsis:

Halloween just got a whole lot darker…

DARK HALLOWS: 10 Halloween Haunts is a wonderfully chilling collection of creepy tales that will have readers up late into the night–but only if they leave a light on!

I intended to read October Screams but apparently I abandoned it last year. So, Dark Hallows was next on my anthology list. I love reading a Halloween short story a day just to get in that Halloween mood.

No Rest for the Wicked

Synopsis:

In one Halloween obsessed Midwestern town, everyone’s on red alert after a local politician goes missing. Little do they know it’s only the beginning.

It’s been close to twenty years since forensic pathologist Dolores Hawthorne left her hometown of Little Horton, Wisconsin. The town is famous for its Halloween celebrations, but also its history of violent deaths linked to the holiday. To Dolores, it’s the place she fled, family, bad memories, and all. Until the FBI calls to tell her that her father–the former mayor turned US Senator–is missing under mysterious circumstances.

Some people count to ten to wake up from a nightmare. Dolores always counts the bones of her head instead: sphenoid, frontal, lacrimal. But no matter how many times she counts them, it doesn’t change the fact that her father is missing, that his final words of warning to her were to trust no one, and that now, the rest of her family is giving Dolores a chilling welcome. With Halloween fast approaching, Dolores must face the past she left behind before it’s too late.

This is giving me Bones meets Halloweentown (minus the monsters) vibes and I’m here for it. I don’t know if that makes sense to anyone else, but it does to me, hahaha. I’ll let you know if it lives up to that.

Kiss Slay Replay

Synopsis:

It’s the picture-perfect wedding weekend: The venue is dreamy, the weather is beautiful, love is in the air—and Willa Sullivan is having a bad time. She’s excited to celebrate her best friends’ finally having the big wedding they’ve always wanted, but this is the first time she’s seen her ex-fiancé in months, and he brought a date. Everything feels off, like she stumbled into an alternate universe. But things start to look up when Willa meets Danny, the groom’s charming and single childhood best friend. When they sneak off together, their rendezvous is interrupted by a masked killer terrorizing the reception. Willa and Danny fight to save the ones they love and survive the night, but the killer is unrelenting. A final girl Willa is not.

Or is she? She wakes up and it’s the morning of the wedding. She just had the most intense nightmare of her life. Only as the day unfolds, there are some uncanny coincidences that make her question whether it was really a dream, déjà vu, or something more sinister. After a horrifying turn of events, Willa comes to understand that she’s stuck in a loop of carnage and terror that she must learn how to escape or else suffer a fate worse than death—being an eternal wedding guest.

It’s not October without a Rachel Harrison novel. However, this one is going to take some convincing. I’m not super thrilled about a wedding setting but if anyone can pull it off it’s her.

All Hallows Eve

Synopsis:

Halloween, Samhain, Día de los Muertos—festivals across the world where we can commune with those we have lost, when spirits can cross over, and when the boundary between the living and the dead is far, far too thin.

A young boy encounters a woman with an ancient and terrifying link to the holiday, a group of college students attend a Halloween party to die for, and a troubled girl exploits a local urban legend to try and turn her life around. 

From America to New Zealand via the rural Romanian wilderness, this anthology explores our worldwide obsession with the spookiest season of the year, when the veil is lifted and the spirits come alive. Featuring 19 original stories from bestselling and award-winning masters of the genre, and from Hugo, World Fantasy, Locus, Bram Stoker and Shirley Jackson award-winning editor and horror legend Ellen Datlow, this anthology invites you to carve a pumpkin, light the lanterns and welcome in trick or treaters from across the world. 

Again, I am all for a Halloween anthology. I love the concept of exploring other cultures’ traditions.

The Witch

Synopsis:

Some secrets don’t die–they wait.

When Julia Barlow loses her job and her apartment, she has nowhere left to go but Pemberton, her family’s sprawling seventeenth-century estate in rural Massachusetts. Officially, she’s there to check in on her aging grandmother. Unofficially, she’s hoping the old house will give her a place to disappear.

Instead, Pemberton begins to unravel her.

Every night, the grandfather clock stops at exactly 3:41 a.m. The lights flicker without warning. And a disembodied voice cries for help outside Julia’s bedroom door.

As Julia digs into the house’s dark history, she uncovers the story of a woman executed for witchcraft in 1692–and realizes the past may not be finished with Pemberton yet. When decades of family lies begin to surface, Julia must confront a terrifying truth: Pemberton may be haunted by women whose voices refuse to stay silent.

This will be my first Mcfadden book, but I’m really looking forward to it. I’m a sucker for a witchy book anytime but especially in October.

The Whitechapel Full Moon Society

Synopsis:

When Caroline Foster arrives at the Whitechapel Full Moon Society in search of her missing brother, she finds a dilapidated façade belying an interior as opulent as any exclusive gentlemen’s club. In exchange for room and board, Caroline is hired as the Full Moon’s maid, where she is given three orders: don’t ask personal questions, stay out of the iron-barred room on the second floor, and remain in her bedroom from sunup to sundown on the full moon.

But when it is revealed that the previous maid was murdered—an early victim of Jack the Ripper—and her brother has left behind no answers, only more questions, Caroline begins to suspect her hosts might be hiding something. As more bodies turn up with a connection to the Society, Caroline fears she may have unwittingly stumbled into a bedtime story, the kind with monsters and curses, family secrets and ancient lore.

Tantalizing and pulsing, Elizabeth DeLozier’s sophomore novel gives an exciting alternative look into the infamous Jack the Ripper story with a major, supernatural twist.

I love a secret society book especially when it leans more supernatural. The fact that it’s set in Victorian London sounds like the perfect recipe for an atmospheric spooky season read.

So that’s my October 2026 tbr. I’m hoping these fit the spooky vibes. What are you planning to read?