In ranking from least scary and spooky to most, here are some stories that suit the dusk-comes-early evenings we’ve been having, with cooler temperatures and a whole lot of damp.

First, Cherie Dimaline’s Funeral Songs for Dying Girls (2023), which includes glimpses of nighttime tours of haunted spaces in the city (i.e. pretend ghosts with a stake in perpetuating beliefs in these hauntings) with Win’s actual experience growing up on the grounds of the cemetery that her dad manages (i.e. connections with Indigenous ancestors). She’s in high school now, and reconciled to her strange relationship with what’s dead and gone (including her mother), and what remains and endures after a loss. The other kids in her class ditch on a field trip to the museum, but she is in her element, surrounded by “old stuff, dead stuff, and things that were used and held years ago”.

While reading about the cemetery, I pictured The Necropolis, which is the sort that begs the word ‘charming’ and then leaves you uncomfortable about that. But Win won me over, the way she plays with numbers (and puts them into orderly states, when her world gets jittery), her sassy take on things, and the way that Dimaline allows her to be tender (o-c-c-a-s-i-o-n-a-l-l-y) without ever crossing into sentimentality. [Note: I wanted to read another of her books after she was awarded the Neustadt Prize earlier this year, and this was a good choice.]

“This wasn’t the last time things got heated on the grounds; over the years there were the make-out sessions during visiting hours, teenagers jumping the fence at night to grope between the monuments, and the behind-the-chapel humping squeezed in between funerals and wakes. Dad said it was because grief did funny things to people, but I knew it was because people were just basically assholes.”

Only a smidge more unsettling is Eden Royce’s novella Psychopomp & Circumstance (2025) which seems to be her first book for adult readers.

Phaedra is twenty-one years old when she agrees to manage her Aunt Cleo’s affairs— her “homegoing”—following her death. Only when Phee’s travelling alone to her Aunt’s home does she reflect on how unusual it is that she’s never visited there alone before; her own parents still think of her as a child, and her Aunt Cleo was estranged from the rest of the family for reasons that Phee only partly understands.

So when it comes to her Aunt’s affairs, she’s confronted with a lot to manage in a literal sense—not having lived or moved independently through the world in general.

But also with some unexpected matters swirling around the veil between the worlds. It’s a gently told story, as much as that can be true when matters of mortality are under scrutiny, and when there is a room in a house with no door to access it.

“As she went, she turned on lamps in anticipation of the coming darkness. Instead of cutting through the gathering gloom, the lamps glowed with a tender illumination that called shadows closer. They stretched along the walls, arching high and long above, around her.”

For another reader, Lauren Carter’s The Longest Night (2025) might not fit into this list; her fiction and poetry straddle the line between beautiful and haunting.

But this book gave me that feeling you get when you dream about waking up, and you go back to sleep in your dream and, then, have to struggle to the surface of consciousness like you can’t catch your breath to truly wake yourself up For Reals.

That feeling scares me, and that’s the feeling I had the whole time I was reading her third novel. So, for me? Scarier than cemeteries and corpses. From another perspective, there’s nothing otherworldly about this story: it feels real, it feels like it could happen to you. (The others here are from big publishers, but this is from Canadian indie, Freehand Books, based in Calgary, Alberta.)

“She tries to resist, but as if it were a real rainbow made only of water droplets splitting light, her hand has no power to push it away. Quickly, the tea is in her mouth, sinking fast, through the thin skin of her tongue—I remember once licking the post of the chain-link fence around the playground, that sensation of being held fast, then the sharphard pull, and pain—into her blood.”

Never Whistle at Night, a 2023 collection of dark short stories (edited by Shane Hawk and Theodore C. Van Alst Jr), is not only a consistently good representation of short fiction, but a great introduction to Indigenous writers for those who are looking to expand their TBRs. From the opening tale, you quickly have a sense that there might be some figures from Indigenous legend to scare you, but it’s just as likely that there will be badly behaved humans.

There is a debate of sorts in the introduction, over what’s horror and what’s psychological fiction and what’s simply good storytelling (where talk of an essential category dissolves into a broader discussion about human behaviour), that got me thinking. And, of the writers I already knew (thirteen of the twenty-six), I particularly enjoyed Kelli Jo Ford’s “Heart-Shaped Clock” and, of the new-to-me writers, I was left most curious about Amber Blaeser-Wardzala’s “Collections”. Beware: some scary stuff!

“A drop of sweat rolled across Peter’s temple and drenched his ear canal. He thumbed it, attempting to push the cold drop of sweat away from his eardrum. He was unsuccessful. The scarce plant life was brittle, the water on their stems having turned to vapor under the relentless sun. This burning hot day gave way for our ancestors to get even. (Beginning of D.H. Trujillo’s “Snakes are Born in the Dark”)

Contents: Twenty-six stories, beginning with Mathilda Zellers’ “Kushtuka” and ending with Waubgeshig Rice’s “Limbs”

And, finally, a 2025 flip book from Blackfeet writer Stephen Graham Jones, which contains two independent novels: The Babysitter Lives and Killer on the Road. This is full-on horror territory, and even if you’ve only dabbled in the genre, you will recognise the tropes. It’s Jones’s speciality: knowing where all the beats land, inside and out. With  the emphasis on the insides.

He’s in the know, so you’re in the know; and it’s comfortable, you feel like you’ve been invited someplace you’ve been before; except it’s like you wanted to refuse the invitation, only you couldn’t; and now, you just stick around, watching it happen, unable to look away. It’s winning, this dance between formula and subversion (the babysitter, for instance, she’s just as super smart as his other teenaged heroines) and even when I’ve thought I mightn’t finish a book by SGJ, I can’t seem to stop myself. (I’m reading another right now!)

“Charlotte gasps reaches forward for the anchor the water heater can be—anything, please, even that—but the water heater’s not there. She sucks a mouthful of this thick air, screams it back out, sure she’s falling, sure she’s drowning, sure there’s nothing real to breathe, here, and reaching up for the tights covering her eyes, she realizes she’s not holding  Desi’s hand anymore.”

Where are you on the spectrum of creepy reading for this season? Do you find yourself more or less inclined towards spooky stories in 2026 than in other years?