12 Spooky Stories—and Even Spookier Cover Art

The leaves are changing, the air is cooling, and everything is vaguely pumpkin-flavored. We’d like to celebrate the start of autumn with some of our favorite scary stories, complete with illustrations and memorable quotes.

1.) The Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka

Was he an animal, that music would so move him?

2.) The Black Cat by Edgar Allan Poe

My original soul seemed, at once, to take its flight from my body; and a more than fiendish malevolence, gin-nurtured, thrilled every fibre of my frame.

3.) Hamlet by William Shakespeare

There is nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so.

4.) Dracula by Bram Stoker

I am all in a sea of wonders. I doubt; I fear; I think strange things, which I dare not confess to my own soul.

5.) A Good Man Is Hard to Find by Flannery O’Connor

She had never given much thought to the devil for she felt that religion was essentially for those people who didn’t have the brains to avoid evil without it.

6.) The Fall of the House of Usher by Edgar Allan Poe

An irrepressible tremour gradually pervaded my frame; and, at length, there sat upon my very heart an incubus of utterly causeless alarm.

7.) The Witch of Blackbird Pond by Elizabeth George Speare

She saw now that she could not tell him about the books she had loved any more than she could make him see the palm trees swaying under a brilliant blue sky.