BOOKS

Novelists have used everything from real killers to newsworthy hostage situations to literal white whales to craft their fiction.

If you want to expand your horror reading beyond Stephen King, look no further than this list, which features everyone from Mariana Enriquez to Stephen Graham Jones and beyond.

Some, like Harriet Beecher Stowe and Victor Hugo, believed they had communicated with spirits directly; others, like Nathaniel Hawthorne and Thomas Hardy, had ghostly encounters they couldn’t explain.

The true facts surrounding the classic work are as mysterious and intriguing as the novel itself.

As is often the case when you look back into history, there’s more than one possible answer. But one of the leading contenders has a fairly predictable culprit: the Puritans.

From famous authors to a Roman emperor, these spirits sure had a lot to share.

The Dollar Baby contract is Stephen King’s way of helping film students adapt his stories without financial barriers.

You can play Dr. Seuss ‘Scrabble’ here or there—you can play it anywhere!

Precursors to the story about the girl with the green ribbon were written by Washington Irving, Alexandre Dumas, and more famous authors.

‘The Vampyre’ is largely forgotten today, but it upended centuries of vampiric lore 80 years before Bram Stoker’s ‘Dracula’—and from its spooky beginnings to its scandalous misattribution, its history was as dramatic as fiction.

Learn about Henry James’s ‘The Turn of the Screw’—the classic ghost story that inspired (among many other things) Netflix’s ‘The Haunting of Bly Manor.’

Non-Philadelphians can finally look up the meaning of ‘jawn’ in the dictionary.