It’s October – Halloween season in much of the world! – and the supernatural is as much a part of the season as pumpkins and candy corn. Monsters are also longtime staples of Romancelandia! In the mood for some spooky love stories? Check out some of our DIK favorites featuring some Halloween archetypes!
Zombies:
We do have books under our Zombies tag, but they’re books where zombies exist, not books where someone falls in love with a zombie. Those are out there, but we haven’t reviewed or DIK’d one that I know of.
Vampires:
NOTE: In addition to our vampire tag, you can search for “vampire romance” in our Power Search.
This book is natural. It is the highest compliment I can give to a book. It is naturally flowing – the plot, the emotional progression, the dialogue. Read Beloved Vampire, even if you think you’re sick to death of vampires. You won’t regret it. The story is so sensual, so romantic. I’m envious of the fact that I’ll never get that first-time excitement again.
Sunshine by Robin McKinley
Ghosts:
This is an unexpected gem; funny, emotional and sexy. Tyler Lindsey is a bellboy at a nice Boston hotel. He has an okay girlfriend, an okay apartment, an okay life. Then one day he enters a wealthy rock star’s suite with his room service, and finds the musician, Chris Raiden, dead on the floor from a heroin overdose. Tyler’s life changes from this point onwards. His girlfriend leaves him and he discovers he is haunted by the …world’s most narcissistic ghost.
Local legend has it that Serena murdered her husband and fell to her death on her wedding night. Serena is known to leave women alone but poses a threat to any male who sleeps on her castle’s grounds; this seems borne out when Alex climbs the castle tower to watch a tremendous meteor shower, glimpses Serena, and nearly falls to his death.
The Truss family lived in the Ukraine in the late 1960s when it was still under Communist rule. Anya, a ballerina in training, drowned while running from her family’s pursuers. She became a Vila, a nymph with power over the wind. In her ghostly form she is invisibly tethered to her tattered ballet shoe that sits on the riverbank where she drowned. Anya seeks her ballet master, a cruel and demanding man named Stas Demyan who broke her spirit. Sergey, a police officer, seeks the same man as Anya for his own reasons. Sergey is shocked to come face to face with a ghost. And not only is Anya a spirit, she is also a Siren, her voice and body ensnaring Sergey with her sexual power.
Witches:
Justine is a witch. She rarely practices magic and instead runs a bed and breakfast on San Juan island. When she discovers that a geas has been placed upon her which keeps her from falling in love, she becomes enraged and breaks the geas with no research as to the consequences of her actions. Since all high magic demands some sort of sacrifice the repercussions are huge. Enter the hero, Jason Black, a man born with no soul.
This is the first title in the Circle trilogy. In the year 1128, on the isle of Eire, the vampire Lillith stole Hoyt’s brother by making him into a soulless blood sucker. Hoyt’s goddess Morrigan sent Hoyt forward to the 21st century to find allies for a great battle. One recruit is a human witch whom Hoyt saw in his dreams before traveling into the future: Glenna Ward, a hereditary witch with formidable powers of her own.
And let’s not forget stories with a spooky tone!
Gothic
NOTE: not all stories tagged “gothic” are romances. The review usually makes it clear.
At time of writing, his novel is available in used paperback only.
Want more supernatural love? Try some of our other tags: mermaid/merman, shifter romance, dragons, fairies, gods and goddesses, Angels, demon, medium
Got some favorites not listed here? Please share!
~ Caroline Russomanno
Jordan Price Castillo’s Psycop series doesn’t fit neatly into the categories above because 1) the MC is psychic, but he does spend quite a bit of time interacting with ghosts; and 2) there is a romantic arc over the series (but not every book is a romance).
Same with ZA Maxfield’s The Long Way Home (MC is psychic and ghosts are involved) except it is definitely a romance.
I don’t read much spooky romances or spooky books in general. I tend to have two types of reactions to them: 1. This is ridiculous, I can’t suspend my disbelief enough to take this seriously. 2. I actually buy the story and I end up frightened of my own shadow, unable to turn the lights out at night. And I have enough anxiety and sleeping problems without intentionally adding to either.
One book that does come to mind, though, which I really enjoyed and also had a haunted house and a ghost story as an integral part of the storyline, is The Widow of Rose House by Diana Biller. (Cece already mentioned this!) It has a lovely, eccentric, heart-on-his-sleeve hero Sam, an inventor and professor who uses scientific means to study ghosts. And an equally lovely, more closed off and prickly heroine Alva who owns the house where Sam wishes to run his experiments and who initially thinks ghosts are nonsense. It’s set in the Gilded Age, and the secondary characters are wonderful too. This book is not something I’d recommend if you want to read something really scary but I found it eerie at times and at least one sequence was particularly chilling.
I am one of those people who are super brave during the day then scare myself stupid at night thinking about the spooky stuff I read while in bed with the covers up to my nose.
It’s interesting how nighttime and darkness have the ability to amplify the spookiness effect of the spooky stuff and make the kind of places, spaces and phenomenons scary that one would think nothing about during daytime. If I knew the book I was going to read had the ability to scare me, I’d never dare to read it at night, so there’s braveness in doing that too, at least from my point of view.
That’s so true annik. I think about it when the power goes out (happily rarely) during a storm and all the streetlights are out as well.
We have all become so accustomed to having light whenever we want it, on roads etc. that when the power is out it’s like going back in time. It makes me think of people traveling at night before these modern luxuries and how very dark it must have been and how everyone must have planned trips to make it to an inn or safety before dark.
‘There is something about the light of day that makes everything seem safer and more optimistic.
You’re so right. The way electric light (and electricity in general) enables the modern way of life is so integral that we don’t really even think about it. We use electric light both actively (the lights we turn on and off ourselves) and passively (streetlights, lighting of other public spaces both indoors and outdoors) so much that it’s hard to keep in mind what a luxury it indeed is. Unless, for a reason or another, we suddenly don’t have access to it anymore, like during the power failures you mentioned.
I’ve always been impressed how widely people managed to travel by land considering how much the available modes of transportation and being dependent on daylight, moonlight and terribly weak light sources slowed down the progress. Also, I find it interesting to think that even with the best possible light sources at use, it was still usually more or less dusky indoors especially after nightfall. Candles, light from a fireplace, oil lamps, gaslight – they just can’t compete in brightness with electric light, and they were dangerous besides. It’d be horrible to have a light source that might set your house on fire just like that – and the next thing you know, the rest of the city block is on fire too. I’ve also wondered about peoples eyes – all the reading that was done not to mention all the craftsmen and –women, for example, doing their work year after year in such insufficient lighting.
Sometimes, watching a historical TV series or movie I’ve wondered if it was a conscious decision not to pay much attention to the fact that the lighting situation was quite different from the current one back in the period they’re portraying. Some historical accuracy naturally has to be sacrificed lighting wise so that the footage isn’t murky to the point of unwatchable, but it is possible to give a strong impression of period accurate lighting and still make the footage aesthetically pleasing. It is of course a whole nother thing if it is a stylistic choice to ignore the period lighting altogether, but that’s something that is usually pretty easy to spot, I think.
I can think of two historical movies off the top of my head that used natural light for filming (but both are quite heavy and not “happy” by any means).
One is Barry Lyndon directed by Stanley Kubrick set in the 18th century. It even uses the heavy powdered makeup on people that was popular at the time. The other is The Witch which is an incredibly accurate but very dark horror movie set in 17th century Puritan New England. They both really show what it must have been like to live under those lighting restrictions. The lighting in the movies might have been chosen not just for accuracy but to also reflect the tones of the movies.
Fire was an incredible hazard and I’ve seen different sources argue about what was the biggest risk to women’s lives historically speaking. Some say childbirth and others argue fire. It’s crazy to think that pretty much all of Medieval London that existed up to that point was wiped out in the fire of 1666.
I think movies and books neglect the fact that a lot of buildings and things were designed to use natural light. They always show monks copying manuscripts in these dark rooms by one candle when they surely would have done their work by big windows in daylight and some scriptoriums didn’t even have walls at first, just a roof.
Even in the early 19th century when there were far more light sources available, things like surgical “theatres” were built with huge domes and windows so surgeries could be done using as much natural light as possible. There is one called the “Ether Dome” in my state that was built in 1821 that you can still visit.
I’m glad to know I’m not the only one who sits and thinks about these things!
I didn’t even know that historical movies have been actually made using only natural light! How fascinating! I found clips of the Kubrick movie from Youtube and they were surprisingly pleasant to watch, no squinting required. My father is a movie enthusiast who has a huge collection of movies (and especially old movies) so I’m definitely going to ask if he might have this one when I talk to him next time. I don’t mind heavy or dark themes, but I still don’t think I’ll be able to watch The Witch – horror really isn’t my cup of tea. I did see enough footage on Youtube, though, to see what you mean and be impressed.
I am not surprised to hear that some argue that fire might have been an even greater risk to women’s lives than childbirth. Fire was such an essential part of everyday life since both lighting and heating depended on it in a way or another, and yet the devastation fire could cause was just terrible. Like The Great Fire of London in 1666 so devastatingly demonstrated, as you mentioned.
It’s impossible to say in how many productions I’ve seen a scene with monks copying or reading manuscripts by candlelight in what seems like the darkest possible room known to the human kind. Sure it makes a dramatic scene, but as you pointed out, it doesn’t have much to do with practicality or even facts.
The surgical theatre you mentioned sounds amazing and also makes so much sense – of course you’d want the place for things that require the utmost precision to be designed so that it’s possible to make the most of daylight there.
I live in a country where the late autumn/winter/early spring months are very dark. In the northern parts of the country the sun doesn’t rise at all for almost a month and even in the latitude where I live there are several weeks where daylight only lasts about two hours. The