The 10 Scariest Books to Read for Halloween

So Halloween is almost upon us, and that means the cable channels with names like Discovery and Travel and Learning and History and American Movie Classics and A&E are trotting out their specials ghost stories and monsters and the Top 10 This or That of Horror. Now, that's all well and good ... but for my money, if you really want to be scared, you need to read a book. One of my obsessions is collecting horror novels from the 30s, 40s, 50s and 60s. I have a healthy collection interspersed within my library, horror anthologies edited by Christopher Lee and Alfred Hitchcock, books from the 30s and 40s by A. Merritt and John W. Campbell, Jr. that are so old they are in bags and I haven't read them because I'm afraid they'll fall apart. If I had $1,200 in disposable income that I had to answer to no one about, I would scoop up a book I found online: a 1940s collection of horror short stories edited by Boris Karloff and signed by Karloff himself. I also have a complete collection of the novels of Stephen King, Bentley Little, Dean R. Koontz and almost all of the novels of Ramsey Campbell, so when I talk about scary books ... it is with no small amount of modesty that I say I know whereof I speak; and since it seems to be the time of year for this sort of thing, here in no particular order (except for alphabetical by book title) are The 10 Scariest Books to Read for Halloween: