“Wendy? Darling? Light, of my life. I'm not gonna hurt ya. I'm just going to bash your brains in.” -- The Shining

Have you been looking around, bored, thinking, "Oh no, 2020 isn't stressful enough? Actually, it's a bit dull." Well, no worries! We have some of the creepiest BAM Exclusive horror novels that will keep you up all night.

Check out our top 5 favorite horror picks for fall!

1. Carrie

Carrie was the odd one at school; the one whose reflexes were always off in games, whose clothes never really fit, who never got the point of a joke. And so she became the joke, the brunt of teenaged cruelties that puzzled her as much as they wounded her.

There was hardly any comfort in playing her private game, because like so many things in Carrie's life, it was sinful. Or so her mother said. Carrie could make things move-- by concentrating on them, by willing them to move. Small things, like marbles, would start dancing. Or a candle would fall. A door would lock. This was her game, her power, her sin, firmly repressed like everything else about Carrie.

One act of kindness, as spontaneous as the vicious jokes of her classmates, offered Carrie a new look at herself the fateful night of her senior prom. But another act-- of furious cruelty-- forever changed things and turned her clandestine game into a weapon of horror and destruction.

She made a lighted candle fall, and she locked the doors....

2. The Haunting of Hill House

Our BAM Exclusive edition features a glow in the dark cover. First published in 1959, Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House has been hailed as a perfect work of unnerving terror. It is the story of four seekers who arrive at a notoriously unfriendly pile called Hill House: Dr. Montague, an occult scholar looking for solid evidence of a “haunting”; Theodora, his lighthearted assistant; Eleanor, a friendless, fragile young woman well acquainted with poltergeists; and Luke, the future heir of Hill House. At first, their stay seems destined to be merely a spooky encounter with inexplicable phenomena. But Hill House is gathering its powers—and soon it will choose one of them to make its own.

3. Call of Cthulhu

‍Frequently imitated and widely influential, Howard Phillips Lovecraft reinvented the horror genre in the twentieth century, discarding ghosts and witches and envisioning instead mankind as a tiny outpost of dwindling sanity in a chaotic and malevolent universe. Lovecraft’s preeminent interpreter S.T. Joshi presents a selection of the master’s fiction, from the early tales of nightmares and madness such as “The Outsider” and “Rats in the Walls,” through the grotesquely comic “Herbert West—Reanimator” and “The Hound,” to the overpowering cosmic terror of “The Shadow Over Innsmouth” and “The Call of Cthulhu.” This definitive edition reveals the development of Lovecraft’s mesmerizing narrative style and establishes him as a canonical—and visionary—American writer.

4. Salem's Lot

Our BAM Exclusive Edition features a glow in the dark cover (the blood and the text). Ben Mears has returned to Jerusalem's Lot in the hopes that living in an old mansion, long the subject of town lore, will help him cast out his own devils and provide inspiration for his new book. But when two young boys venture into the woods and only one comes out alive, Mears begins to realize that there may be something sinister at work and that his hometown is under siege by forces of darkness far beyond his control.

5. Interview with the Vampire

This beautiful BAM Exclusive Edition features a personal note from the author, Anne Rice, detailing the inspiration behind the book as well as the impact it had on her and her readers. The story is ostensibly a simple one: having suffered a tremendous personal loss, an 18th-century Louisiana plantation owner named Louis Pointe du Lac descends into an alcoholic stupor. At his emotional nadir, he is confronted by Lestat, a charismatic and powerful vampire who chooses Louis to be his fledgling. The two prey on innocents, give their "dark gift" to a young girl, and seek out others of their kind (notably the ancient vampire Armand) in Paris. But a summary of this story bypasses the central attractions of the novel. First and foremost, the method Rice chose to tell her tale--with Louis' first-person confession to a skeptical boy--transformed the vampire from a hideous predator into a highly sympathetic, seductive, and all-too-human figure. Second, by entering the experience of an immortal character, one raised with a deep Catholic faith, Rice was able to explore profound philosophical concerns--the nature of evil, the reality of death, and the limits of human perception--in ways not possible from the perspective of a more finite narrator.