The buzz on Stephen King’s latest novel, 11/22/63, is that it’s about a man who goes back in time to save JFK. It’s true; that is the mission undertaken by King’s hero, 35-year-old high school teacher Jake Epping. But to a careful reader, it quickly becomes clear that this is actually a novel about falling in love: first with a time period, and then with an awkward, tall librarian named Sadie.

Jake learns about the portal to the past from his friend Al, the owner of the local diner-slash-time-machine. Al had hoped to thwart Lee Harvey Oswald on his own, but had to return to the present when he became ill with lung cancer. (One of the quirks of King’s time-travel is that no matter how long you stay, you only lose two minutes in the present.) So Al boots an unbelieving Jake out through the back door of the diner’s storeroom, into a warm September day in 1958. From the moment Jake steps up to a soda counter and orders a root beer, he is hooked on the past. “It was . . . full. Tasty all the way through,” Jake thinks. Like the apple in the Garden of Eden, the drink has revealed new possibilities. With his 21st-century life off the rails, Jake decides he has nothing to lose by taking up Al’s quest, and he heads to Texas.

In Stephen King’s latest novel, a man goes back in time to prevent the Kennedy Assassination.

Since Jake arrives in the past in 1958, there’s a lot of ground laid before the novel arrives at the titular date of the JFK assassination. Despite the somewhat leisurely pace, the reader is entertained by creepy details about the Oswald family and interludes with 1960s-era spying equipment, which run alongside Jake’s gradual embrace of the small Texas town where he takes a job at the high school. He meets Sadie; he is mothered by the school’s stern-but-soft principal; he directs the school play. As time passes, his 1960s life becomes more real to Jake than his life in the 21st century. Still, as 1963 approaches, he is unable to forget his mission.

Through his depictions of 1950s and ’60s life, it’s clear that King has a deep affection for the time period in which he grew up. Even so, he’s not blind to its problems, portraying the bad smells in the air near factories with no EPA regulations, the racial strife and the poverty. His vision of Dallas is particularly sinister; King compares it to Derry, Maine, his iconic fictional city that just isn’t right—one of several nods to his 1986 novel, It. 

This novel stands out from King’s oeuvre because a villain is not immediately apparent. There’s no Plymouth with a mind of its own (Christine), no killer virus (The Stand)—there’s not even an unbalanced parent (The Shining, Carrie) or crazed fan (Misery). But the adversary in 11/22/63 is perhaps King’s most implacable force yet: history itself. Oswald, who is a lackluster bad guy to say the least, is merely its tool, one of many. History, as Al explains to Jake early on, does not want to be changed—“I felt like a man trying to fight his way out of a nylon stocking. It would give a little, then snap back just as tight as before.”—and the past throws up terrifying obstacles to those who would try. This eerie quality further complicates the typical questions about fate vs. self-determination that time-travel stories raise.

Silence of the Lambs director Jonathan Demme has already optioned 11/22/63 for film. Though perhaps less cinematic than some of King’s other works, this quietly moving and thought-provoking book, with its unexpectedly poignant ending, is a compelling tale.

There is a genre of fiction that might well be called “tourism horror.” In such stories, the protagonist travels to a breathtakingly attractive destination, where all hell breaks loose. The masterpieces of the genre are surely Dracula (oh, Transylvania!) and The Shining (talk about a “last resort” hotel). Enter debut novelist Wendy Webb, who gives both Bram Stoker and Stephen King a run for their travel budget, inventing an island in the Great Lakes that can’t be matched for pristine natural beauty, richness of history, touristic amenities . . . and sheer supernatural terror.

One reason why The Tale of Halcyon Crane deserves a place in the canon of tourism horror is its initial twist of the emotional knife: the traumatic discovery that forces our heroine, Hallie James, to make her journey to Great Manitou Island. Ghosts, violent death, witches—none of these terrible presences on the island hold a frightful candle to the psychological devastation at the outset of the novel, when Hallie finds out that she is not the person she thought she was—and neither is her father, nor her mother, nor anything she has ever believed about her family. This internal horror outdistances the merely external threats imposed by Stoker and King.

The emotional impact of the island’s heart of darkness on Webb’s heroine also stands in complete contrast to the way things usually go in the genre. In Dracula and The Shining (or Heart of Darkness, for that matter), the hero or heroine is possessed by the horror, is undone by it and made monstrous. But in The Tale of Halcyon Crane, Hallie James confronts the horror and takes possession of herself, entering into her authentic identity, with all its difficulties intact.

The novel’s affirmative spirit may not be to the taste of diehard horror fans, but it certainly gives a more generous account of how the spirit of a beautiful place can complexly affect a human being, for both good and ill. Wendy Webb is a professional journalist, first and foremost. Like those journalistic masters Dickens and Twain before her, she knows that to write good travel prose, you must give a vivid account of both the demons you find along the way and the demons you bring along with you. That way, the reader always feels right at home.

Michael Alec Rose is a composer who teaches at Vanderbilt University’s Blair School of Music.

The Vanguard Press edition of Douglas Clegg’s Neverland (originally published in 1991 by Pocket Books)—like 2009’s reissue of Isis—features haunting interior illustrations by Glenn Chadbourne; the eerie, meticulously detailed images brilliantly complement the Southern Gothic story of one extended family’s far from idyllic summer vacation on an isolated peninsula off the coast of Georgia.

The month of Halloween brings us Dracula The Un-Dead, a bone-chilling sequel to the classic and the latest in the classic novel revisionist craze. This continuation of Bram Stoker’s Victorian thriller isn’t just family-sanctioned, it’s co-written by a family member. With the assistance of Ian Holt, a Dracula documentarian, historian and screenwriter, The Un-Dead was created by Dacre Stoker, the great-grandnephew of Bram, who claims parts of the novel are based on material cut from the original Dracula and Bram’s own notes.

The Un-Dead rejoins the band of friends and lovers who survived the original novel—Mina and Jonathan, Seward, Holmwood, even Van Helsing—now 25 years after the purported demise of Dracula. Over the years they have each faced disappointment and drifted apart, but they are brought back together when it appears that those who once hunted Dracula have now become the hunted. Someone—or something—is out to get them. Could it be that Dracula himself survived and is back for revenge, or might it be something even more sinister?

In a way, it seems likely that Dacre Stoker has been waiting his entire lifetime to resuscitate and reimagine the immortal prince. In The Un-Dead, Stoker and Holt have assembled an all-star cast highlighting the key players and events throughout history, weaving in Jack the Ripper, the Countess Bathory and her centuries-old rivalry with Vlad Tepes (the historical inspiration for Dracula), the burning of the Lyceum, the voyage of the Titanic and yes, even Bram Stoker himself. Indeed, the cameos and tributes—as clever and playful as they may be—are at times so numerous that they risk overwhelming the plot itself. Additionally, there are a few historical slips that will trip up vampire diehards, for example the erroneous statement that Vlad is short for Vladimir, rather than Vladislav, which was actually the historical prince’s real name.

Since Dracula is often viewed as a creature symbolizing lust and unquenched desire, it is perhaps unsurprising that The Un-Dead owes as much in tone to contemporary romance novels as to the post-Anne Rice vampire epics. The eroticism that merely coils beneath the surface of Dracula is overt here, complete with actual bodice-ripping. The violence is also more explicit, befitting a more modern audience, and ramps up throughout the course of the novel. At times it verges on gruesome, but thankfully touches of humor, however dark, manage to save these scenes and offer the appropriate respite. At one point in the novel, a man feels the strong urge to vomit upon realizing he has been gutted, but then of course he remembers that he (quite literally) no longer has the stomach for such action.

As for the prose itself, the initial attempt to capture the Victorian style of writing embodied in a letter from Mina to her son is a bit clunky; however readers who persevere through this experiment in writing will ultimately be rewarded with a breathless narrative rife with twists and turns. The writing is spirited, if not inspired, and the story will quickly capture readers’ interests and imaginations. The Un-Dead is a slow boil that eventually builds up a good deal of steam and ambient mist, although perhaps a “red fog” would be more apt. Apparently it’s true what they say: it’s hard to keep a good vampire down!

Eve Zibart was born on Halloween, and her license plate reads “vampyr.”

John Harwood's second novel ought to be read aloud, through the reek of cigar smoke, port wine, yuletide logs and leather bindings. The Seance, like its predecessor The Ghost Writer, takes up the bookish thread of classic British supernatural fiction as if it had never been cut by modernity. Fortunately, Harwood writes so well that an uninitiated reader can perfectly enjoy his tale of atmospheric mystery and dread without catching all the gothic and Victorian allusions. With the right key, however, The Seance offers a first-rate passport into the strange and chilling realm of literature where Harwood plays and with such postmodern abandon.

And so, dear reader, here is a brief inventory of The Seance's sources—a whirlwind tour of the book's ingenious exploitation of the genre's traditional plot devices. If you decide to investigate the original works, please proceed with care. Once you cross this threshold, any possibility of real ghosts will pale by comparison to the genuine terrors of these imagined ones:

1.) An uncanny piece of armor inspires mortal fear (Horace Walpole's The Castle of Otranto).

2.) A young woman is threatened in an isolated house by an evil tormentor (Matthew Lewis' The Monk, Ann Radcliffe's The Mysteries of Udolpho).

3.) A bizarre and blasphemous electrical experiment wreaks havoc (Mary Shelley's Frankenstein).

4.) A man deranged by love for his wife exploits her special condition to explore the permeable boundary between life and death (Edgar Allan Poe, The Fall of the House of Usher).

5.) The legal matter of a strange bequest leads our heroine on a dangerous path of self-discovery (Mrs. Riddell, passim).

6.) A dark and charming man of great intelligence and cruelty seduces a beautiful woman in order to feed his desire for immortality (Bram Stoker, Dracula).

The catalogue of references could continue with a social history of spiritualism in the late Victorian period and arrive at last at the great ghost stories of Montague Rhodes James, the point from which Harwood launched his debut novel. It is a scary and joyful ride. Hold on tight. The horses are about to run wild through the dark wood.