When searching for Halloween-appropriate literature, one would most likely turn first to the books that created the holiday’s classic figures or that are notorious for their overall eeriness. I am thinking mainly of books like Bram Stoker’s Dracula, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, Robert Louis Stevenson’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Washington Irving’s The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, and much (if not most) of the work of Edgar Allan Poe. However, there are plenty of other great stories that deal with the grotesque, the frightful, and the chilling. So, if you are tired of the more typical scary classics, here are some alternative options for Halloween reading.

Before Frankenstein’s monster or Mr. Hyde plagued Europe, there were Grendel and his mother. The first half of the Anglo-Saxon epic Beowulf relates the gruesome blood feud between these savage beasts and the Danish people. Take your pick from famous modern translations of the Old English text, including Seamus Heaney’s award-winning version from 1999 and the recently released translation by J. R. R. Tolkien. Also consider reading John Gardner’s novel Grendel, which tells the tale from the monster’s perspective.

More bizarrely monstrous is Franz Kafka’s The Metamorphosis, in which the main character, Gregor Samsa, is inexplicably changed into a giant insect. Both the grotesque imagery of Gregor’s new, bestial form and the transformation’s miserable implications for his life make this a strange, horrifying read.

Shakespeare’s Macbeth—a chilling story in a variety of ways—begins with three witches who would fit in at any classic Halloween party. In fact, they are in some ways the model for our stereotypical image of witches. Cows say “moo,” dogs say “woof,” and witches recite Shakespeare: “Double, double, toil and trouble; / Fire burn, and cauldron bubble” (4.1.10–11).

If the fateful prophecies of Shakespeare’s three witches leave anything to be desired in terms of occult drama, pick up Goethe’s Faust: entire choruses of witches and evil spirits descend on the Harz Mountains for an eerie ritual on Walpurgis Night. Even if the entire poem weren’t about a man selling his soul to the devil, this scene alone would make it a perfect story for Halloween.

Although one usually thinks of Christmas as festive rather than frightening, Charles Dickens structured the entire plot of A Christmas Carol around a series of ghostly hauntings, making the novella a fitting book for both holidays. The narrative is ultimately a redemptive one, but Scrooge encounters plenty of darkness and death along the way. Dickens plunges the audience directly into this grim journey with the famous, macabre first sentence: “Marley was dead: to begin with.”

William Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom! explores haunting of a less supernatural sort. When Quentin Compson travels from Mississippi to Boston to begin his university education, he is accompanied (psychologically) by the “ghosts” of various people from his hometown’s history. As he and his roommate attempt to make sense of their scattered, Gothic narratives, the spectral figures of Coldfields, Bons, and Sutpens rise before them in the cold Harvard dormitory. Quentin might well agree with Joyce’s Stephen Dedalus: “History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.” And what a vivid nightmare it is.

Then, of course, there are the countless books whose characters are haunted by aspects of their own lives: past deeds and failings, dismal present conditions, grim future prospects, and all the other forms of existential angst possible in our great human tradition. The most powerful example that comes to mind is Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment. Both the grisly murders Raskolnikov commits and the mental and spiritual suffering he undergoes in their aftermath are at least as frightening as any ghostly haunting could be. See also: Hedda Gabler, The Fall, Death of a Salesman, and many, many others.

And finally there is Cormac McCarthy. Many of his works contain gruesome events and chilling characters, but a few stand out in particular as being appropriate for the Halloween season. Child of God relates the exploits of Lester Ballard, an Appalachian man who commits various unspeakable atrocities, the least disturbing of which is murder. McCarthy’s latest novel, The Road, is a sparse, post-apocalyptic journey, both gloomy and nerve-wracking. Most ominous, however, is his arguable masterpiece, Blood Meridian, an exceedingly bleak story set in the wilderness of the pre-Civil War West. I have encountered no character who is able to instill pure, cold terror as completely as Judge Holden. In fact, his dark philosophical musings and horrific acts of violence prompted literary critic Harold Bloom to call him "the most frightening figure in all of American literature.” Eat your heart out, Stephen King.