On the shelves - Oct. 27

These books are available at the Clovis-Carver Public Library:

“The Haunting of Hill House” by Shirley Jackson: Jackson's The Haunting of Hill House is considered one of the greatest haunted house stories ever written. Set around the dark history of the house built by Hugh Crain ninety years earlier and the deaths of Hugh, his two wives, his daughter, and anyone else that lived in the house, Dr. Montague, a renowned scholar of the occult, decides to conduct an experiment to determine whether or not the house truly is haunted. Joining him in the experiment is his bohemian assistant Theodora, Luke, the heir to the house who does not believe in the supernatural, and Eleanor, a timid young woman whom Montague picked because of her ties to poltergeist activity. At first their stay at the house is mostly uneventful, the nights after the gates to the grounds are locked disrupted by only a few strange and unexplainable phenomena, but as the days go by, it becomes more and more apparent that something walks within the walls of Hill House, and means to take one of the guests for its own forever.

“Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark” by Alvin Schwartz: Back in popular demand following the release of both a film adaptation and a documentary about their cultural impact, all three books in the Scary Stories trilogy-Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark, More Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark, and Scary Stories 3: More Tales to Chill Your Bones-were some of the most read children's books in the 1980s and 1990s, as well as some of the most controversial due to their subject matter. Collected and rewritten for younger readers by author and folklorist Alvin Schwartz, each Scary Stories book is an anthology of famous, and lesser known, scary stories and urban legends from around the world, introducing these tales in short, easily digestible chapters that can be enjoyed by children, teens, and adults of all ages. With spooky illustrations by Stephen Gammell for each tale, many of the stories are chilling bits of folklore meant to teach an important lesson, while others are intentionally written by Schwartz to be campfire stories for readers to reenact for an audience-complete with jump-scare punchlines-and some are meant to be more funny than dark.

“Doctor Sleep” by Stephen King: Coming soon to theaters, Stephen King's Doctor Sleep is the sequel to King's classic horror novel The Shining, and tells the continuing story of Danny Torrance, whose “shining” ability was nearly taken by the sinister Overlook Hotel when he was a child. Decades later, Danny — now called Dan as an adult — is still unable to fully escape the tragedy that befell his family and claimed his father Jack's sanity and life, Dan having inherited his father's struggle with alcoholism. After drifting aimlessly from place to place for many years, Dan has finally found some semblance of purpose by working at a hospice where he uses his “shine” to comfort the patients while they are dying, earning him the nickname “Doctor Sleep”. When he meets Abra, a twelve-year-old with a shine even more powerful than his own, he reluctantly gets pulled back into the ghosts of his traumatic past when he must protect Abra from a nomadic tribe called the True Knot, who, as the Overlook tried with Danny, will stop at nothing to steal Abra's soul.

— Summaries provided by library staff