It Knows What Scares You: Spooky Staff Picks
Published on September 30, 2025
By Catherine L.
What makes a chill race up your arms, your stomach drop, your pulse quicken, and your eyes get wide?
Most book genres are based on subject or storyline: magical abilities in fantasy, a murder to solve with a culprit to catch in mystery.
Horror, however, is defined by something else: the emotion it elicits. Which means it’s especially personal.
A show I watched religiously after school as a child, Are You Afraid of the Dark?, had an episode about a gargoyle statue that could reach into a person’s mind, see their worst fear, and bring it to life to terrorize them.
Just normal kid stuff.
(*Spoiler alert* - in case a kids' show featuring a pre-Scream Neve Campbell is still on your watchlist.) The walls start closing in on the claustrophobic girl. The guy afraid of snakes is confronted with a boa constrictor at his feet. An abusive family member is even, seemingly, brought back from the dead. This incredible power to conjure fear is then used to... make soup. I’m not kidding.
But hey, horror is about emotion, not logic.
Our horror-loving team at the library is bringing back the Scary on the Prairie program series this October with a writing contest, writing workshop, a Midwest Paranormal Files program, a murder mystery night, and a BYOB book discussion.
I asked the team, what books bring your fears to life?
Midwestern Gothic by Scott Thomas
What scared you: These three novellas all take place in Kansas, and feature what is most haunted in the Midwest: the land.
Staff: Kim
Graveyard Shift by M.L. Rio
What scared you: Cemeteries are haunted enough, but add in gravediggers and rats, and the scary factor shoots up! This is a novella, so it’s something short to get you started.
Staff: Hannah
The Final Girl Support Group by Grady Hendrix
What scared you: This book pays tribute to popular horror movies such as The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, A Nightmare on Elm Street, and Scream. As the final girls are hunted once more, you don’t know who you can trust or who will be left standing at the end.
Staff: Hannah
The Twisted Ones by T. Kingfisher
What scared you: The physics of time and space are a mystery to most, and there is nothing more frightening than learning that what you believed to be myth is real and hungry.
Staff: Claire
Lovely Dark and Deep by Elisa A Bonnin
What scared you: This gives a whole new meaning to the feeling of being watched in the woods.
Staff: Claire
Lute by Jennifer Thorne
What scared you: The idea that there is nothing you can do—you cannot bargain, hide from, outsmart, or out-common-sense fate. If it is your destiny to die that day, you will.
Staff: Samantha
What Moves the Dead by T. Kingfisher
What scared you: The idea of nature being a living, thinking sentience. I went from loving nature to being so creeped out by how smart it is.
Staff: Samantha
We Used to Live Here by Marcus Kliewer
What scared you: Something feels so off, but you don’t know why! The dread builds and builds in this big house where anything could be happening in another wing.
Staff: Catherine
Dracula by Bram Stoker
What scared you: The atmosphere. While Dracula is a love story—a very dark, twisted, unconventional love story—there is a sense of dread that looms over the entire novel, even when the book leaves the confines of the Count's decrepit gothic castle.
Staff: Ben
Dracul by Dacre Stoker and J. D. Barker
What scared you: The suspense. Dacre Stoker and J. D. Barker crafted a prequel to Bram Stoker's famous novel where Bram is the main character, and the mystery of how every plot point comes together to lead up to Dracula is ominously atmospheric and simply riveting.
Staff: Ben
Penpal by Dathan Auerbach
What scared you: The authenticity. It doesn't include any fantastical, paranormal, or scientific elements; it's pure realistic fiction with a very twisted, unsettling story. Not once did I think to myself, "That would never happen in real life," and that may be the scariest thing about the book. I'm fully desensitized to the horror genre, but this got under my skin.
Staff: Ben
Delicious.