10 Summerween Book Titles!

1. How To Sell A Haunted House, Grady Hendrix ✨ 3.65, 419 pages

When Louise finds out her parents have died, she dreads going home. She doesn’t want to leave her daughter with her ex and fly to Charleston. She doesn’t want to deal with her family home, stuffed to the rafters with the remnants of her father’s academic career and her mother’s lifelong obsession with puppets and dolls. She doesn’t want to learn how to live without the two people who knew and loved her best in the world.

2. Home is Where the Bodies Are, Jeneva Rose ✨ 3.81, 256 pages

While going through their parents’ belongings, the siblings stumble upon a collection of home videos and decide to revisit those happier memories. However, the nostalgia is cut short when one of the VHS tapes reveals a night back in 1999 that none of them have any recollection of. On screen, their father appears covered in blood. What follows is a dead body and a pact between their parents to get rid of it, before the video abruptly ends.

3. The Sundown Motel, Simone St. James ✨ 4.0, 327 pages

Upstate NY, 1982. Every small town like Fell, New York, has a place like the Sun Down Motel. Some customers are from out of town, passing through on their way to someplace better. Some are locals, trying to hide their secrets. Viv Delaney works as the night clerk to pay for her move to New York City. But something isn’t right at the Sun Down, and before long, she’s determined to uncover all of the secrets hidden…

4. Salem’s Lot, Stephen King ✨ 4.10, 498 pages

A Classic!

‘Salem’s Lot is a small New England town with white clapboard houses, tree-lined streets, and solid church steeples. That summer in ‘Salem’s Lot was a summer of homecoming and return; spring burned out, and the land lay dry, crackling underfoot. Late that summer, Ben Mears returned to ‘Salem’s Lot hoping to cast out his devils… and found instead a new unspeakable horror.

5. Disco Death Trap, Cameron Roubique (roo-beek) ✨ 4.15, 292 pages

This doesn’t specifically take place during the summer, but it’s slasher-gore heavy.

It’s New Year’s Eve 1980, and the students of DeAngelo High School are lacing up their skates for the All-Night New Year’s Eve Lock-In at the Rollerville Roller Disco. Some of them just want to skate and dance the night away to the pounding disco music. Some want to pull a few pranks and have a few laughs. For others, like Dan Parsons, tonight is a chance to move on and forget about his ex-girlfriend, maybe even flirt with Denise, that cute girl behind the snack counter. It seems like nothing can go wrong.

6. The September House, Clarissa Orlando ✨ 3.89, 352 pages

Once the walls start to bleed, it’s time to leave.

When Margaret and her husband Hal bought the large Victorian house on Hawthorn Street—for sale at a surprisingly reasonable price—they couldn’t believe they finally had a home of their own. Then they discovered the hauntings. Every September, the walls drip blood. The ghosts of former inhabitants appear, and all of them are terrified of something that lurks in the basement. Most people would flee.

Margaret is not most people.

7. Ring Shout, P. Djeli (gee-lee) Clark ✨ 3.97, 197 novella 

Patrick Bateman moved among the young and trendy in Manhattan in the 1980s. Young, handsome, and well-educated, Bateman earns his fortune on Wall Street by day while spending his nights in ways we cannot begin to fathom. Expressing his true self through torture and murder, Bateman prefigures an apocalyptic horror that no society can bear to confront.

8. Final Girls, Riley Sager ✨ 3.82, 352 pages

Ten years ago, college student Quincy Carpenter went on vacation with five friends and came back alone, the only survivor of a horror movie–scale massacre. In an instant, she became a member of a club no one wants to belong to—a group of survivors similar to her, known in the press as the Final Girls. Lisa, who lost nine sorority sisters to a college dropout’s knife; Sam, who went up against the Sack Man during her shift at the Nightlight Inn; and now Quincy, who ran bleeding through the woods to escape Pine Cottage and the man she refers to only as Him. The three girls are all attempting to put their nightmares behind them, and, with that, one another. Despite the media’s attempts, they never meet.

9. My Heart Is A Chainsaw, Stephen Graham Jones ✨ 3.52, 405 pages

That’s not the only thing that’s getting carved up, though – this, Jade knows, is the start of a slasher. But what kind? Who’s wearing the mask? Jade’s got an encyclopedic recall of every horror movie on the shelf, but… will that help her survive? Can she get a final girl trained enough to stop all this? You won’t find a more hardcore 80s-slasher-film fan than high school senior Jade Daniels. And you won’t find a place less supportive of girls who wear torn T-shirts and too much eyeliner than Proofrock, nestled eight thousand feet up a mountain in Idaho, alongside Indian Lake, home to both Camp Blood – site of a massacre fifty years ago – and, as of this summer, Terra Nova, a second-home celebrity Camelot being carved out of a national forest.

10. The Staircase In The Woods, Chuck Wendig ✨ 3.65, 388 pages

While on a camping trip, five high-schoolers bound by an oath to always protect one another discover something in the middle of the forest: a mysterious staircase to nowhere. One friend climbs up but does not come back down. Then the staircase disappears. Twenty years later, it reappears, and the friends return to find the lost boy—and what lies beyond the staircase.