Middle-aged death-metal rock star Jude Coyne doesn't know what he's in for when he buys a Floridian ghost from an online auction site to add to his collection of ghoulish curiosities, which includes a 16th-century skull and a snuff film that effectively ended his marriage. The ghost arrives in the form of a black suit folded into a black heart-shaped box, but it doesn't stay there. As soon as the suit emerges from the box, Jude's life is invaded by Craddock, a dead man with a deadly plan. And in facing this very real ghost in the present, Jude is forced to face many ghosts from his past, including his terrifyingly abusive father, a girlfriend who died tragically and his fallen band mates.

Joe Hill (who, incidentally, is the son of macabre master Stephen King) draws readers in from the first line and successfully creates a suspenseful and foreboding page-turner that keeps them up long after bedtime. He doesn't waste a lot of time with background before jumping head-on into the tale of terror; readers eager for the gore to begin will appreciate this quick start.

Hill is also skilled at conjuring up haunting images one that particularly resonates is the description of a little-girl ghost, the long-dead aunt of Coyne's girlfriend, Georgia. This ghost isn't evil, but her image is the stuff of bad dreams: "Her head was raised, so she seemed to be staring directly at Jude through the window. It was hard to be sure, though. Her eyes were obscured by the black marks that jittered before them." Sometimes this tale does feel unrelentingly bleak ("He felt crowded by death," Hill writes in a typical passage, "felt the promise of death all around, felt death on his chest, each death a stone heaped on top of him, driving the air out of him."). But ultimately, Jude, as haunted as he is by the dead, the living and the living dead, is a character worth rooting for, and that makes for a gripping, if grim, read.

Rebecca K. Stropoli writes from New York City.

John Marks' third novel, Fangland, is no ordinary vampire tale. Evangeline Harker embarks on what might be the worst business trip ever. She's a producer for The Hour, a television news show, and is sent to Romania to investigate a story. She finds Ion Torgu, purported crime boss, but instead of giving her an interview, he takes her to his crumbling and creepy hotel in Transylvania, where she soon learns that he's a vampire. No fangs here, though. Torgu's teeth, though hideously stained, are rounded, not sharp. He relies on two henchmen to murder his victims and pour the blood in a bucket for him to drink.

The vampires in this novel don't merely skulk about looking for blood. They are instead haunted by an eerie chant of place names: Treblinka, Olindo, Kosovo, Mycenae, Nanking. All places where terrible massacres have occurred. It's no accident that the offices of The Hour look down over Ground Zero in New York.

Evangeline disappears for months, and most of her family, friends and co-workers think she's dead except the ones who are receiving strange e-mails from her account. After mysterious shipments begin arriving from Romania, the show's sound system seems infected with a virus, and a strange chant permeates every recording the crew makes. Staff members begin wasting away, and then Evangeline is found in Romania, convalescing in a convent, in terrible shape. When she returns to New York, it becomes clear that Torgu has dark plans for everyone at The Hour. Marks tells his story through the e-mails, therapy journals and diary entries of characters. His experience working as a producer at 60 Minutes makes you feel like he knows just what to satirize at The Hour. He's not simply retelling Dracula; his vampires are more like guardians of the dead than horror movie villains. But don't think they're not scary. Fangland is a novel that will keep you up late: It's sad and terrifying and darkly funny.

Tasha Alexander is the author of And Only to Deceive.

When Stephen King completed his Dark Tower series in 2004, fans rejoiced and worried. King had been saying for years that he was planning to retire after finishing the saga. It would be a fitting way to go out; many consider the fantasy series King's magnum opus. Even the announcement that King had agreed to write a book for a new mystery imprint, Hard Case Crime (October's The Colorado Kid), didn't completely reassure fans after all, a hardboiled noir isn't exactly familiar King territory. Still, it was hard to believe that King, an uncommonly driven and imaginative writer, could put away his pen forever.

Diehard fans breathed a sigh of relief this summer, when the Internet was suddenly buzzing with news: far from retiring, King was writing a new book, Cell, to be published on January 24. It was to be a return to his roots, a classic horror tale starring zombies created by cell phone signals gone bad. As in much of King's work, this somewhat fantastical setup is balanced with a realistic setting and average Joe characters, making readers wonder, in spite of themselves, whether it could really happen.

Cell opens on a sunny October afternoon in Boston Common, where Clayton Riddell has decided to celebrate the sale of his graphic novel by purchasing an ice-cream cone. Standing in line in front of him are three iPod-carrying teens; behind him, a businesswoman on her cell phone. Nothing could be more normal until the businesswoman hangs up her phone and lunges for the ice-cream seller's throat. Later, it becomes known that a strange signal was sent through every operating cell phone on that October day, turning anyone who happened to be making a call at that time into a murderous zombie. No one knows how or why the pulse happened, but those who remain unaffected (and uneaten) join together to take a stand against the monsters. Buzz for Cell got louder in August, when King gave readers a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. He joined several other authors (including Amy Tan, Lemony Snicket and Nora Roberts) in auctioning off character names to benefit the First Amendment Project, a nonprofit group that supports free speech. The winner could have a name of their choice used in Cell. In the auction description, King said the character "can be male or female, but a buyer who wants to die must in this case be female. In any case, I'll require a physical description of the auction winner, including any nickname (can be made up, I don't give a rip)."

The bidding started at $9.99, but it didn't stay there long as King fans fought for the chance to appear in Cell. The eventual winner was Florida resident Pam Alexander, who gave her brother Ray Huizenga a $25,100 birthday gift. It's definitely extravagant but it's a once-in-a-lifetime thing, and he's worth it, Alexander told MSNBC. A Nebraska man lost out to Alexander, even though he'd been willing to take out a loan on his house for a chance at immortality, as he put it.

Nowadays, the idea of Stephen King retiring seems laughable. In December, he announced a partnership with Marvel Comics to produce a line of comic books based on the Dark Tower series. The first volume will be available in April. The books will be illustrated by Jae Lee, an Eiser award-winning artist, and they will chronicle the younger years of Roland, the Gunslinger. The Dark Tower books finish up a lot of business from the other books, King says on his website. It's possible these graphic prequels will do likewise. As always, there are a couple of upcoming movie and TV versions of King's works on the way as well. Though adaptations of his novels range from the classic (Carrie, The Shining) to the abysmal (Thinner), hope springs eternal in Hollywood: legendary horror director George Romero has just signed on for the film version of From a Buick 8. TNT is casting a miniseries featuring King stories from the 1993 collection Nightmares and Dreamscapes; William H. Macy and William Hurt will star. Through it all, King continues his column for Entertainment Weekly. If, as his website claims, the force of [his] invention has slowed down a lot over the years, there's still more than enough of it to satisfy fans.

Under the Dome opens with a signature Stephen King moment: a woodchuck, foraging for food, hides from a passing human—and is chopped in half as an impenetrable dome appears around the city limits. At the same instant, a plane crashes into the dome above him. “The Seneca exploded over Route 119 and rained fire on the countryside. . . . A smoking forearm . . . landed with a thump beside the neatly divided woodchuck.” In seconds Chester’s Mill has transformed from your typical small town to a closed-off stage where the worst and best of human nature will be displayed.

The worst comes in the form of Big Jim Rennie, a politician who takes advantage of the police chief’s demise to consolidate power and deputize a motley crew of thugs—including his disturbed son—to police the town. Throw in an unbalanced meth addict and some seriously stale air (the dome is impermeable not only by weapons, but also by clean air), and Chester’s Mill is well on its way to becoming a chaotic police state. An Iraq war vet, a newspaper publisher, a physician’s assistant and a couple of spunky teens (among the novel’s most engaging characters) try to foil Big Jim’s plans while the world watches—at least, at first. Though their situation draws TV crews from around the world, once the novelty fades, other news stories take top billing despite the residents’ increasingly desperate state, recalling tragedies like Hurricane Katrina.

As in his epic The Stand, King uses his characters’ predicament to address major questions about human nature. The emphasis here is on compassion—or, sparing that, pity. What makes us stop seeing people as people, and why? These deeper themes combined with King’s trademark suspense and folksy charm keep the almost 1,100 pages turning and make Under the Dome a novel readers will relish. 

What could be more appropriate on Halloween than reading books guaranteed to make you check under the bed and inside the closet before you go to sleep at night? If you're tired of reading the same old horror classics, don't worry; this fall there is a cornucopia of new novels guaranteed to give you the creeps.

Start your scary sojourn by sampling the work of Tananarive Due, the acclaimed author of such novels as The Between, My Soul to Keep and The Living Blood uniquely disturbing stories that effortlessly mix the horror, mystery and supernatural genres. In her latest book, The Good House, Due has written her best (and scariest) work to date. Like her other books, The Good House takes strong African-American themes as the foundation for a twisted tale. Every summer, Angela Toussaint, a lawyer living in California, visits her deceased grandmother's house with her estranged husband and teenage son Corey. The old house, which is located in a rural town in Washington state, is known as the Good House by locals, in part because Angela's grandmother Marie, a secret practitioner of voodoo, grew powerful medicinal herbs that helped area residents with a variety of ailments. But Angela's summer getaway quickly turns into a nightmare when her son commits suicide in the cellar. Years later, after Angela gets out of a mental hospital, she goes back to the Good House to figure out why Corey killed himself. What she uncovers a family curse that goes back generations will not only put her own life in jeopardy, but everyone close to her as well. With her new book, Due ascends into the realm of titans like Stephen King, Dean Koontz and Peter Straub. The Good House is intelligent, hypnotic, unnerving: a singular work of horror.

Next up on our horrific tour is John Shirley, whose new novel, Crawlers, is perhaps his most commercially palatable work to date. With Crawlers, he not only seamlessly merges horror and cyberpunk in a gruesomely explicit storyline guaranteed to frighten, he also manages to satirize modern-day society as only he knows how. When a secret military project involving nanotechnology goes terribly wrong and rogue nano-entities begin contaminating a quiet California suburb, Major Henri Stanner is called in to assess the extent of the damage. What he finds is the stuff of nightmares. The breakouts have infected a growing number of humans and animals and have begun ripping them apart and putting them back together in new, semi-mechanical forms. The cluster mind calls itself The All of Us and its mission is simple: to spawn. When Stanner realizes the government is covering up the whole disaster, he is forced to take matters into his own hands.

Crawlers has Shirley's trademark intensity, moral outrage and critical wit but also includes deep social and political allegories as well. What happens when humanity becomes too dependent upon technology? Are we sacrificing consciousness for mindless pleasures and superfluous comforts? What if sentient technology turns the tables and begins using us as its tool? Shirley's latest is as terrifying as it is thought-provoking.

Peter Straub's novel, lost boy lost girl is a truly groundbreaking work from the renowned master of literary horror. In it, he revisits characters from previous works: popular writer Timothy Underhill (Koko and The Throat) and visionary crime solver Tom Pasmore (Mystery). Upon hearing of the death of his sister-in-law, Underhill returns to his hometown of Millhaven (Straub's much-visited Illinois suburb, his answer to Stephen King's Castle Rock) to console his brother Philip and his teenage nephew Mark. Philip's wife, Nancy, has, for no apparent reason, committed suicide. Not surprisingly, Philip is beside himself, but Tim is more concerned with 15-year old Mark, who seems to be harboring dark secrets. After the funeral, Tim returns to New York City and a few days later receives a frantic call from his brother looking for Mark. Tim returns to Millhaven in search of his nephew only to find a serial killer on the loose, an abandoned house in the neighborhood emanating evil and a horrible family secret.

With lost boy lost girl, Straub has produced much more than a psychological thriller. It's a ghost story, a murder mystery, a beautiful love story, a gruesome account of a serial killer and, ultimately, a heartfelt study of the tenuous bonds that hold family together through good times and bad. Incredibly complex, mesmerizing and chilling, lost boy lost girl is classic Straub.

If you're still searching for something to curdle your blood when Halloween arrives, Anne Rice's latest literary treat which is aptly available October 31st will surely do the trick. Rice's newest offering, Blood Canticle, continues her wildly popular Vampire Chronicles (Interview with the Vampire, The Queen of the Damned). It seems that the legendary vampire Lestat is having something of an identity crisis. Formerly known for his evil ways, he's now more concerned with love and loyalty. Rice has said that Blood Canticle will mark Lestat's final appearance, but as we all know, a good vampire is hard to keep down.

Master of horror Stephen King returns on Sept. 24 with the release of From a Buick 8, a gather-round-the-campfire tale of a sinister car. This time King transports us far from Maine back to the rural Pennsylvania of 1979. Through a series of flashbacks, 18-year-old Ned Wilcox, struggling with his father's death, picks apart the tangled web of events surrounding the horrible accident that ripped the elder Wilcox from his family. First, Ned must discover the secret inside State Police Troop D's Shed B: a vintage Buick 8 Roadmaster. It seems the Buick's owner disappeared at a service station, leaving behind the unusual vehicle, a doorway between this world and another. Troop D decided it would be better if John Q. Public never learned about the car and what it can do. After all, the first trooper on the scene vanished the same day, just like the car's mysterious driver.

As in earlier books like Cujo, plot is the driving force in this novel. This is a mature King, though, who gathers the voices of several characters to move the story, providing depth and structure to the straightforward narrative. The men (and one woman) of Troop D spin their saga in round-robin fashion for Ned, whose father was one of the original officers to discover the Buick, and the one who took the fiercest interest in its origins. Underlying themes of loyalty and generational bonding mesh flawlessly with an eagle-eyed examination of police procedure and culture. All these elements lead ultimately to the book's central tenet: Life is full of occurrences that shape us in unimaginable ways.

In an author's note, King says he dreamed up this smoothly told tale while driving from western Pennsylvania to New York, shortly before his 1999 accident. His description of the eerie similarities between his own near-fatal misfortune and the plot of From a Buick 8 may well raise the hairs on the back of your neck.

Stephen King has scared Kelly Koepke since she was a teenager reading The Shining.