Shelfways After Dark: A Weird October

Everything here is on the Clinton Public Library’s shelves, with call numbers as of September 30, 2026.

Start at the door

The Haunting of Hill House (H JAC). The house that taught every other house how to be wrong.
Harvest Home (H TRY). A farm village, a harvest rite, and everyone smiling a little too much.
Hausu (DVD HOU). A 1977 Japanese haunted-house film in which a piano eats a girl. Pure joy.
Dredge (GAME DRE). A cozy fishing game until the fish start coming up wrong.

Malpertuis (H RAY). A Belgian mansion where the old Greek gods are trapped inside people.
The Houseguest (H DAV). Amparo Dávila: something lives in the house, and no one will name it.
The Boss in the Wall: A Treatise on the House Devil (H DAV). Avram Davidson takes the creature in the walls perfectly seriously.
Seven Empty Houses (H SCH). Samanta Schweblin’s Argentine domestic dread.
The Wolf House (DVD WOL). A Chilean stop-motion nightmare painted onto the walls of a house.
Skinamarink (DVD SKI). Two children, a dark hallway, and the doors are gone.
Jan Švankmajer (BLU SVA). Czech animation where meat, dolls and furniture come alive.

Collected Ghost Stories of M.R. James (H JAM). The best ghost stories in English, and this copy has never been checked out.
Tales of Moonlight and Rain (H UED), then Ugetsu (DVD UGE). The 1776 ghost stories and the 1953 film Mizoguchi made from them.
The Shadow Book of Ji Yun (H YUN). Eighteenth-century Chinese fox spirits and “true” weird tales.
Kwaidan (BLU KWA), Jigoku (DVD JIG) and Daiei Gothic (BLU DAI). A Japanese ghost-film night.
The Book of Yokai (398 FOS), then the Yokai Monsters films (BLU YOK) and Mizuki’s Kitaro manga (MANGA MIZ BK. 0). Read the monsters, watch the monsters, read the comics about the monsters.
The Ghosts of Okinawa (398.2 HIT).

The Vourdalak (DVD VOU). A Tolstoy vampire tale whose vampire is played by a puppet.
The Savage Hunt of King Stakh (DVD SAV). A Belarusian gothic: fog, marshes and a ghostly hunt.
Orchard of the Dead (H GRA). Stefan Grabiński, the Polish Poe.
There Once Lived a Woman Who Tried to Kill Her Neighbor’s Baby (H PET). Petrushevskaya’s scary fairy tales.

Fred Chappell’s Dagon (H CHA), plus Under Twin Suns (H CHA), new tales of the King in Yellow.
The Lovecraft Anthology (GN LOC VOL. 1), then Call of Cthulhu (793.93 CTH) and its Grand Grimoire of Cthulhu Mythos Magic. Read it, then play it.
Planet of the Vampires (BLU PLA). Mario Bava’s 1965 space horror, the film Alien borrowed from.
Sun Ra, It’s After the End of the World (CD SUN). The soundtrack.

Passport to Magonia (001.94 VAL) and American Cosmic (001.94 PAS). UFOs, fairies and belief.
They Flew: A History of the Impossible (133.8 EIR). Levitating saints, documented.
Poltergeists (133.1 SIT). Sacheverell Sitwell’s 1940 case files.
City of the Beast (133.43 BAK). Aleister Crowley’s London.
Memoirs of My Nervous Illness (616.89 SCH). A judge’s 1903 account of his own psychosis.
Novels by Aliens: Weird Tales and the Twenty-First Century (133 MAR).
Fortean Times (MAG FOR) and Weird Tales (MAG WEI). Monthly dispatches from the unexplained.
Haunted Wisconsin (WISC 133.1 SCO). Closer than you’d like.

Junji Ito, Uzumaki (MANGA ITO VOL. 1-3). A town infected by spirals. On hold, so get in line.
Shintaro Kago, Dementia 21 (MANGA KAG VOL. 1). Grotesque, absurd and funny.
The EC Archives (GN EC): Tales from the Crypt and The Vault of Horror. The comics Congress panicked about in 1954.
Creepy archives (GN CRE) and Alan Moore’s Saga of the Swamp Thing (GN MOO BK. 1).
Hellboy (GN MIG VOL. 1), then Hellboy Animated (DVD HEL).

Mad God (BLU MAD). Phil Tippett’s 30-year stop-motion descent into hell.
Junk Head (DVD JUN). A one-man stop-motion epic about a world underground.
Dogra Magra (BLU DOG). A Japanese amnesia nightmare from a famously “unfilmable” novel.
Inland Empire (BLU INL). David Lynch at his most lost.
The Magick Lantern Cycle (BLU MAG) and The Maya Deren Collection (DVD MAY). Occult cinema and dream cinema.
The Living Skeleton (DVD LIV), Goke, Body Snatcher from Hell (DVD GOK) and The X from Outer Space (DVD X FR). Glorious 1960s Japanese strangeness.
Woodlands Dark and Days Bewitched (DVD 791.43 WOO). Three hours on folk horror; pair it with Harvest Home.

Call of Cthulhu: Gateways to Terror (793.93 CTH). A ready-made Halloween one-shot.
FE BORG: A Dark Fairytale and Pirate Borg (793.93 BOR).
The Big Squirm and Acid Death Fantasy (SF 793.93 GEA), and The Ruinous Palace of the Metegorgos (SF 793.93 LOC). The weirdest adventures on the shelf.

The Cramps, Bad Music for Bad People (CD CRA). Psychobilly for carving pumpkins.
Sun Ra, any of them (CD SUN).

Edward Gorey (SPOOKY JUV E GOR): The Gashlycrumb Tinies, The West Wing, The Evil Garden, The Osbick Bird.
The Soap Lady (SPOOKY JUV E FRE). Based on a real mummified body in a Philadelphia museum.
Struwwelpeter (SPOOKY JUV E HOF) and Belloc’s Cautionary Tales (SPOOKY JUV 821.91 BEL). Grim books from the 1800s and early 1900s.
Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark (SPOOKY JUV FIC SCH). Still the best gateway there is.
For teens: Our Shadows Have Claws (YA MEN) and Mary’s Monster (YA 921 SHE).

None of these has ever been checked out. Be the first reader and claim a prize.

Of One Blood (H HOP). Pauline Hopkins, 1902: mesmerism, ghosts and a hidden African city.
My Bones and My Flute (H MIT). A Guyanese ghost story “in the old-fashioned manner.”
Cold Skin (H PIN). A lighthouse on an island, and things that come out of the sea at night.
The Flaw in the Crystal (H SIN BK.36). May Sinclair’s uncanny stories.
Cruise of Shadows (H RAY). Jean Ray’s haunted tales of land and sea.
Where Furnaces Burn (H LAN) and The Wishing Pool (H DUE).