OK so I found this roundup of 10 supernatural fantasy books and my already-precarious to-be-read pile is now officially a to-be-read avalanche. October does this to me every year. The second there's a chill in the air I want ghosts, haunted houses, cursed objects, witches, the whole deal, and this list delivers.

Supernatural fantasy is such a cozy little lane, you know? It's fantasy but with the lights flickering. Magic that lives in old houses and family secrets instead of glowing swords, and I will take a slightly menacing grandmother with hidden powers over a chosen one prophecy basically any day of the week.

The list runs the whole gamut too. You've got your gothic haunted-mansion vibes, your small-town-with-a-dark-undercurrent books, your 'this family has been dealing with something otherworldly for six generations and nobody talks about it' books. Which, for the record, is my favorite subgenre of anything. Nothing hooks me faster than a family secret that turns out to involve the supernatural.

What I keep coming back to with these books is that the best supernatural fantasy isn't really about the ghost. It's about grief, or belonging, or the house you grew up in, or the people you love being weird and unknowable sometimes. The ghost is just the delivery system. The spookiness gets you in the door and then the feelings ambush you on page 200 and suddenly you're crying at a haunted house. It happens. It's happened to me more than once.

And it's prime reading weather right now! Blanket out, tea going cold because you can't stop turning pages, one lamp on. Ideal supernatural fantasy reading conditions, and I will not be taking questions.

Go read the full list here and pick your first one. I've already claimed two for myself and I regret nothing, my nightstack can fend for itself.

If you read one and it wrecks you in the best way, come find me. I need people to yell about these with.