Reading Wildly: Scary Books

It's October, so it's time for another round of scary books for this month's Reading Wildly meeting. We explored scary books a couple of years ago, and it's such a perennial favorite that we brought it back this year. We were a little pressed for time at this meeting because we had to combine our department meeting and our RW meeting (happens sometimes, especially with Fall Break happening), so we didn't have a really in-depth discussion about our article. It was Are Goosebumps Books Real Literature? By Leslie Anne Perry & Rebecca P. Butler (Language Arts, Oct. 1997) and we did have a few takeaways:

• Kids know what to expect when they pick up a Goosebumps book: an easy to read, slightly scary and exciting story. 
• Scary stories, including the Goosebumps series transcend gender divides. As much as I really hate the idea of "girl books" and "boy books" (and I really do hate it), scary stories, for kids who like scary stories, are easy to hand to both boys and girls without objections from kids or parents. 
• If we had had time, I would have liked to compile a list of scary story series that would be good for everyone to know, but alas we didn't have time for this. 

So, here are the books we read: 

• Alice in Zombieland by Gena Showalter
• The Dark Thirty: Southern Tales of the Supernatural by Patricia McKissack
• Evil Librarian by Michelle Knudsen
• Guys Read: Terrifying Tales, edited by Jon Scieszka
• Half-Minute Horrors by various authors
• The Haunted Library by Dori Butler
• Hoodoo by Ronald L. Smith
• Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children by Ransom Riggs
• The One-Eyed Doll (Scary Tales series) by James Preller
• The Scarecrow Walks at Midnight (Goosebumps series) by R.L. Stine
• The Screaming Staircase (Lockwood & Co.) by Jonathan Stroud 
• Wait 'Till Helen Comes by Mary Downing Hahn
• The Walls Around Us by Nova Ren Suma

For next month, we are reading horse books (Children's) and animal books (Teen). It was determined that teens didn't have an overwhelming interest in horse books, but my teen librarians did feel like animal books were something more teens were interested in. We'll also start to brainstorm genres that we'd like to explore next year and I'm excited to now have our teen librarians' input in this process! 

Horse books are definitely NOT my wheelhouse, so do you have any suggestions for me?!