We’re more than halfway to Halloween, but for those of us who love spooky season, we wish we could celebrate all year long. With the advent of Summerween, now you don’t have to wait for fall to enjoy the chills and suspense of a good horror or thriller audiobook!
The Summerween holiday originates from the Disney TV series Gravity Falls. The residents of the fictional Oregon town love Halloween so much they decided to celebrate it twice a year – once in summer. We can relate.
Per the animated show’s canon, Summerween is celebrated on the second to last Friday in June, but there’s no official date for it outside of the show – meaning you, dear reader, can get your Summerween on whenever you like.
So pull out those Halloween decorations, carve some watermelons, or bake your favorite fall treat with any of these spooky audiobooks as your companion.
YOUNG ADULT
Malicia
Written by Steven dos Santos, narrated by Sixta Morel, Giordan Diaz, Amanda Alcántara, and Robb Moreira
Slasher meets thriller meets Dominican folklore as four friends find themselves being picked off one by one in a very haunted theme park.
On a stormy Halloween weekend, Ray enlists his best friends Joaquin, Sofia, and Isabella to help him make a documentary of Malicia, the abandoned theme park off the coast of the Dominican Republic where his mother and brother died in a mass killing thirteen years ago.
But what should be an easy weekend trip quickly turns into something darker because all four friends have come to Malicia for their own reasons: for truth, personal gain, support, and betrayal.
But an impending hurricane and their own inner demons aren’t all they struggle to face. The deadliest evil of all is the ancient malignant presence on the island.
Now, Conjurers
Written by Freddie Kölsch, narrated by Giordan Diaz
A spine-chilling debut about queer found family and a love that outlasts death.
Fans of The Craft and other 90’s cult horror classics will love this thrilling murder mystery that explores grief and real-life horrors.
Kölsch describes her book as follows:
Now, Conjurers is a book about a really tight-knit coven of weird high school kids who can do magic that actually works. When their leader, Bastion—secret witch, gentle jock, and the boyfriend of our protagonist, Nesbit—is found murdered in a grisly fashion in the local cemetery, the remaining members of North Coven have to unravel the mystery of his death before the cosmic nightmare hiding under their town destroys all of their lives. It’s part supernatural horror, part tragic romance, and all Y2K-era strangeness.
ADULT
Cinderwich
Written by Cherie Priest, narrated by Traci Odom
A rural Tennessee town is the setting for this southern gothic tale that’s perfect for fans of Appalachian folklore and cozy-yet-creepy mysteries.
“Who put Ellen in the blackgum tree?”
Decades after trespassing children spotted the desiccated corpse wedged in the treetop, no one knows the answer.
Kate Truth and her former college professor, Dr. Judith Kane, travel to Cinderwich, Tennessee, in hopes that maybe it was their Ellen: Kate’s lost aunt, Judith’s long-gone lover. But the people of Cinderwich are staunchly resistant to the outsiders’ questions about Ellen and her killer. The deeper the two women dig, the closer they come to exhuming the evil at the roots of Cinderwich.
If you’re thinking this story sounds familiar, it was inspired by an actual true crime case: a woman’s body was discovered inside a tree in the English countryside during WWII. Shortly thereafter, graffiti began appearing around a nearby town asking “Who put Bella in the Wych Elm?” The woman’s identity remains unknown.
Craft: Stories I Wrote for the Devil
Written by Ananda Lima, narrated by Taylor Harvey
An intoxicating and surreal debut collection of contemporary Kafkaesque stories for fans of Carmen Maria Machado’s Her Body and Other Parties.
At a Halloween party in 1999, a writer slept with the devil. She sees him again and again throughout her life, and she writes him stories about beautiful and impossible things.
These unsettling linked short stories lure listeners into surreal pockets of the United States and Brazil – where they’ll find bite-size Americans in vending machines and the ghosts of people who are not dead – and explores Brazilian-American immigrant experiences of ambition, fear, heartbreak, and home.
Despite her book being categorized as horror, Lima admits she’s a “wimp” when it comes to the genre.
Diavola
Written by Jennifer Thorne, narrated by Andi Arndt
A dysfunctional family is haunted by a vengeful ghost in this unhinged and wickedly funny vacation horror novel.
Anna has two rules for the annual Pace family destination vacations: Tread lightly and survive.
It isn’t easy when she’s the only one in the family who doesn’t quite fit in. Her twin brother, Benny, goes with the flow almost too much; her older sister Nicole expects everyone to fall in line; Mom seizes every opportunity to question her life choices; and Dad, when not reminding everyone who paid for this vacation, just wants some peace and quiet.
The remote villa in Monteperso seems like a perfect place to endure so much family togetherness – except for the strange noises at night, the unsettling warnings from local villagers, and the dark, violent past of the villa itself.
If you enjoyed Netflix’s A Haunting of Hill House, then you’ll love this twist on a classic haunted house story and the exploration of the seemingly inescapable bonds of family mythology.
The Good Girl
Written by Michelle Dunne, narrated by Emer Heatley
Would you know a serial killer if you met one? What if she served your coffee every day?
Grace Murphy doesn’t seem like the type of woman who’d have a man cable-tied to a chair, slowly dying in her house. She lives a quiet life, working as a barista and caring for her sister, providing her with wholesome meals and the clean home they never had as children.
Det. Garda Jerry Hughes knows about Grace’s troubled childhood and still checks in on the sisters from time to time. But right now he’s preoccupied with work – men are going missing in the city with nothing in common aside from a physical resemblance to someone from Grace’s past.
The Hungry Dark
Written by Jen Williams, narrated by Emma Fenney
A scam-artist psychic races to find answers to the murders plaguing a rural town in this haunting thriller.
Ashley Whitelam has turned her childhood visions into a career as a “psychic” – parting people from their money with a combination of psychology and internet research. When the Lake District is faced with a series of child murders, Ashley offers her services to the police for the free publicity. But when she catches a glimpse of the ghosts of her childhood and follows them into the woods, she finds the corpse of the latest missing child.
The press fly into a frenzy and the police grow suspicious: either Ashley’s psychic abilities are real or she’s guilty of murder. Ashley then teams up with Freddie Miller, a podcaster covering the crimes. As they investigate, Ashley realizes that whoever or whatever is haunting the Lakes is haunting her too.
Williams love for true crime podcasts led to her writing crime thrillers, including The Hungry Dark.
On the Surface
Written by Rachel McGuire, narrated by Frankie Corzo, Evan Sibley, Chanté McCormick, Savy Des-Etages, and David Bendena
This psychological thriller examines the travel vlogger subculture and the lives people live off-camera.
Sawyer Stone III and Dani Fox, a young couple who travel the world on their 42-foot sailboat and document it for their YouTube channel, anchor in the Bahamas. On the surface, everything looks perfect. Then Dani vanishes after a boat party with their fellow cruisers.
The search for Dani is initially fueled by concerns that she drowned during one of her daily ocean swims, but Dani’s prescheduled video posts and reveals a darker side to her relationship with Sawyer. As Dani’s disappearance goes viral, internet sleuths unearth secrets from Sawyer’s past. Sawyer Stone is far from perfect, but is he a murderer?
This Skin Was Once Mine and Other Disturbances
Written by Eric LaRocca, narrated by Natalie Naudus, André Santana, Michael Crouch, and Steven Crossley
A brand-new collection of four intense, claustrophobic, and terrifying horror tales from the author of Things Have Gotten Worse Since We Last Spoke.
Jillian Finch, grieving her father’s death, discovers a dark secret that threatens to undo everything she has ever known about him.
A young man’s father informs him of his mother’s passing and upon returning home, realizes he and his father have been cursed with the same affliction.
Enoch Leadbetter goes to buy a knife for his husband to use at a dinner party and encounters a shopkeeper who draws him into a new obsession.
Two old men revive a cruel game with devastating consequences…
When Cicadas Cry
Written by Caroline Cleveland, narrated by Adam Barr
A lawyer and a detective find themselves entangled in secrets, lies, and murder in a small South Carolina town rife with racial tension.
A white woman is murdered in a rural church in Walterboro, South Carolina. Sam Jenkins, a Black man, is found covered in blood, kneeling over the body.
Two young women are murdered on a beach an hour southeast of Walterboro and the killer disappears. Thirty-four years later, the mystery remains unsolved.
Lawyer Zach Stander takes on Jenkin’s defense, but he’s up against a formidable solicitor and his client is hiding a bombshell secret. When Detective Addie Stone reopens the cold case, she discovers long-buried secrets in this small town. Would someone kill again to keep them?
Listeners who followed the high-profile Murdaugh murder trial will enjoy this crime thriller set in the same southern town.
