Horror & SciFi Book Club

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.–Amazon

Communion is the iconic classic in which Whitley Strieber describes his 1985 close encounter experiences. This book, which fundamentally changed the way we understand close encounters and alien abductions, is presented here with a new introduction by the author.

The message of Communion, that something unknown is really happening to people but that we have not studied it enough to understand it, remains as timely now as it was in 1987 when the book was first published. And Whitley Strieber’s riveting account of what he experienced, along with his relentless and expert pursuit of the reality behind the experience, is to this day the greatest such account ever published.–Amazon

First published in 1978, five years after the release of the classic horror film from which it is adapted, The Wicker Man is a gripping horror classic.

It is the tale of Highlands policeman, Police Sergeant Neil Howie, on the trail of a missing girl being lured to the remote Scottish island of Summerisle. As May Day approaches, strange, shamanistic and erotic events erupt around him. Initially he is convinced that the girl has been abducted for human sacrifice – only to find that he may be the revellers’ quarry.–Amazon

Arthur Kipps, a young solicitor, has come north from London to attend the funeral and settle the affairs of Mrs. Alice Drablow of Eel Marsh House. The townspeople are reluctant to share any information about Mrs. Drablow but Kipps soon realizes that there is more to Alice Drablow than he originally thought. At the funeral, he sees a woman dressed in black, with a pale face and dark eyes, whom a group of children are silently watching.

While sorting through Mrs. Drablow’s papers at Eel Marsh House over the course of several days, the routine formalities Kipps anticipates give way to a tumble of events and secrets more sinister and terrifying than any nightmare: the rocking chair in the deserted nursery, the eerie sound of a pony and trap, a child’s scream in the fog, and most dreadfully and most tragically for Kipps, the woman in black herself.–Amazon