Fall Reading List 2022
Find the perfect scary books on the Cult of Weird Fall Reading List, a selection of creepy, paranormal and disturbing reads for the spooky season.
If you’re looking for book recommendations to to satisfy your morbid curiosity, you’ve come to the right place. This fascinating selection of morbid must-reads curated from the forbidden library of Cult of Weird includes:
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Top Book Recommendations
Cursed Objects
Creepy dolls, mysterious boxes, severed heads, deadly diamonds. Some of the most famous items come at a hefty price. J.W. Ocker tells the true stories behind the most notorious Cursed Objects in the world.
The Talking Dead
The dead seem to do a lot of talking. In The Talking Dead, Marc Hartzman collects the words of the dead in writings from spiritualists and psychics, answering the afterlife’s most compelling questions. How are things beyond the grave? What’s God like? What’s Edgar Allan Poe been up to on the other side? And most importantly, what is Heaven like on Mars?
Dark Archives
It’s called anthropodermic bibliopegy – using human skin to bind a book. These books can be found in libraries all over the world. But why? And, more importantly, who? In Dark Archives, Megan Rosenbloom unearths the strange stories behind this macabre practice.
Victorian Book of the Dead
The Victorian Book of the Dead by Chris Woodyard explores historical accounts of exploding corpses, petrified corpse furniture, a man who lived in his wife’s tomb, ghosts, banshees, and other bizarre true tales of Victorian mourning.
Mummies, Cannibals and Vampires
Crowds drinking the spurting blood of a freshly beheaded criminal, still twitching on the guillotine. Magical candles made of human fat. Victorian corpse-stroking. A vampire cult in 19th century Kansas. Cut open the gruesome history of corpse medicine in the updated edition of Richard Snugg’s fascinating work.
This Party’s Dead
Everybody dies, but we don’t all deal with it the same way. Author Erica Buist takes you on a journey to explore death festivals around the world.
Beyond the Dark Veil
Beyond the Dark Veil is a collection of post-mortem and mourning photography from The Thanatos Archive, along with newspaper clippings and other ephemera documenting death and funerals in the Victorian Era.
Atlas of Cursed Places
Atlas of Cursed Places explores 40 locations around the world that are “rife with disaster, chaos, paranormal activity, and death.”
Gory Details
The Feminine Macabre
Bodysnatchers
Mr. Humble and Dr. Butcher
Morbid Curiosities
Morbid Curiosities by Paul Gambino takes a look at some of the most extraordinary and macabre collections from the likes of Ryan Matthew Cohn, Evan Michelson, and more.
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Smoke Gets in Your Eyes
Mortician Caitlin Doughty takes you inside the crematorium and pulls back the curtain to demystify death.
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Ghostland
Ghostland by Colin Dickey examines the history of America’s haunted places and how the spirits of the past affect the living who exist in those places now.
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The Butchering Art
Before Joseph List’s antiseptic method, surgery was a brutal affair that often put patients in more danger than the afflictions the pre-anesthetic operations were supposed to cure. The Butchering Art by Lindsey Fitzharris tells the tales of operating theaters, dead houses, grave robbery, and the breakthroughs that changed medicine forever.
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Lost City of the Monkey God
In 2015 an expedition into the deadly and unexplored jungles of Honduras revealed the ruins of a lost city once inhabited by an unknown civilization. Author Douglas Preston was there every step of the way, from the lidar flights to peer beneath the jungle canopy in search of signs of ancient human existence, to the discovery of a vast city abandoned long ago and a cache of ancient artifacts that may have been an offering to the monkey god before residents fled in fear of curses and disease.
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As Above, So Below
The Freemasons, Odd Fellows, and other fraternal societies formed bonds and developed values which they portrayed through enigmatic symbols of all-seeing eyes, skulls, crossbones, beehives, and more. As Above, So Below is packed with fraternal history and the photos of the secret works of art they used to keep closely guarded within the walls of private lodges and temples across America.
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Cabinet of Curiosities
Learn how to preserve and classify specimens from the natural world and build your very own curiosity cabinet.
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Rest in Pieces
In Rest in Pieces, author Bess Lovejoy tells true stories of grave robbing, missing brains, cadaver brandy, and other misadventures undertaken by the corpses of famous people.
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Diableries
These incredibly rare 3-D stereoscopic views of Hell originated in France in the 1860s. Diableries collects them all into once place so you can revel in their torment with an included stereoscopic viewer.
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Goatman: Flesh or Folklore?
Tales of half-goat, half-man creatures luring hapless teens to their doom and murdering wayward travelers exist across the US. Goatman: Flesh or Folklore? takes you from the backwoods of Wisconsin, where several goatman legends lurk just off the beaten path, to the Pope Lick Trestle in Kentucky where numerous people have lost their lives, and into the government laboratories of Maryland where local lore says a genetic freak was created who now roams the woods with an axe. J. Nathan Couch recounts sightings of famous creatures like the Beast of Billiwack, Pennsylvania’s Sheepman, Sheepsquatch in West Virginia, the Lake Worth Monster of Texas, and other hooved horrors in search of goatman’s origins.
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Stiff
Heavenly Bodies
Taxidermy Art
The Occult, Witchcraft, & Magic
Unmentionable
The Invention of Murder
A Season With the Witch
From Here to Eternity
Death: An Oral History
Memento Mori: The Dead Among Us
American Monsters
The Sick Rose
Death and the Afterlife
Mutter Museum
American Grotesque
The Empire of Death
Cabinets of Wonder
Funerals to Die For
