Spine-Tingling Reads
As Halloween nears, explore the darkness with a trio of books of local provenance.
Summer’s end represents the official beginning of “spooky season”—black cats, jack-o-lanterns, and other hallmarks of Halloween. For fans of horror films and other movies that explore the darkness of humanity, it’s the best time of the year. Readers should rejoice, too, as several recently released books written by storytellers with local ties deserve a home in their respective TBR piles. Following are three worth delving into, preferably under the covers with a flashlight in hand.
Diana Rodriguez Wallach, a Delco native who now lives near Villanova, made quite a stir with her first two YA horror novels, Small Town Monsters and Hatchet Girls. She ups the ante with her latest, The Silenced, about a character who has been transformed in ghastly/ghostly ways by a research project involving an all-girls reform school where horrible things were rumored to have happened. While The Silenced is a work of fiction, Wallach found plenty of inspiration in the historical events associated with a pair of shuttered reform schools in the Philadelphia suburbs.
Who doesn’t love a classic vampire story? You have nearly two dozen to choose from in Vampire Hunters: An Incomplete Record of Historical Accounts, published by Philly-based indie press Speculation Publications. A gorgeous anthology featuring ghoulishly fun art and elegant stories, including a few penned by Philadelphia-area authors, Vampire Hunters explores the lore of undead bloodsuckers and the humans who hunt them. The anthology spans oceans of time and space, from pre-Christianity Babylon to the New World in the 21st century, and each story is written in the epistolary style for reasons this reader won’t divulge here.
What About the Bodies by Ken Jaworowski may not qualify as horror, per se, but the novel explores the many dark sides of human nature and the struggles of life in a small town down on its luck. Jaworowski, a New Jersey resident with strong Philadelphia ties, set What About the Bodies in the fictional town of Locksburg, Pennsylvania, the same setting as his sensational first novel, Small Town Sins. This follow-up explores the lives of a handful of well-drawn characters who find themselves embroiled in sticky situations that endanger their livelihoods, if not their lives—and even if they survive their respective ordeals, they will likely be forever changed in the aftermath.
Published (and copyrighted) in Suburban Life, August 2025.
