ShipLibrary Blog

Halloween 2025

Happy Halloween everyone! 

While many of you know how Halloween is celebrated today, do you know the origins of this holiday? It became with the Celtic festival of Samhain, which was mainly celebrated in parts of the world that we now refer to as Ireland, over 2000 years ago. The festivities would begin on October 31st, the night before the New Year for Celts.  As the passing of one year to the next was considered a transitional period for harvest — marking the end of growth and instead bringing the cold, harsh winter — it was also believed to blur the boundaries of the living and dead. As such, October 31st was seen as the day in which ghosts would return to earth from the spirit realm.

Unlike today, ghosts were viewed by the Celts as a welcoming presence. They helped drive away enemies and made Druids (priests) predictions stronger. The latter was particularly helpful as many communities relied on these predictions to determine the outcome of their futures. There were several traditions that were created to celebrate their arrival. This included the building of bonfires by Druids to make sacrifices to the Gods and wearing costumes created with animal skins. 

When the Celts were eventually conquered by the Roman Empire, Samhain was combined with two Roman Holidays, Feralia and Pomona. Feralia was a day to remember the dead while Pomona honored the Goddess of fruit and trees. 

With the spread of Christianity, Samhain began to be reframed and eventually overshadowed by the celebrations of All Saint's Day on November 1st. However, some traditions still maintained a presence in the Americas with European colonial settlers and Native American blending their customs to become a distinctly new form of holiday. Additionally, the wave of immigrants, especially of Irish origin, helped bolster the holiday even more. 

As Halloween became more popularized, the day began to turn away from spirituality to instead becoming an event driven by community engagement and family-friendly activities. Individuals were encouraged to dress up, trick-or-treat and decorate their houses to show their love of the season. Throughout the 20th century, the intensity for the holiday grew even more until we come to the version of Halloween that we see today. 

Whether you choose to celebrate the holiday with friends, alone, or not at all, we hope that you have a wonderful day.

Below we have included some of the horror books that we have available at the library to either enjoy the spooky season or whenever you need a good scare!

Final Girls by Riley Sager

ISBN: 9781101985380

Publication Date: 2018-01-23

Ten years ago, six friends went on vacation. One made it out alive....   In that instant, college student Quincy Carpenter became a member of a very exclusive club--a group of survivors the press dubbed "The Final Girls": Lisa, who lost nine sorority sisters to a college dropout's knife; Sam, who endured the Sack Man during her shift at the Nightlight Inn; and now Quincy, who ran bleeding through the woods to escape the massacre at Pine Cottage. Despite the media's attempts, the three girls have never met.   Now, Quincy is doing well--maybe even great, thanks to her Xanax prescription. She has a caring almost-fiancé; a popular baking blog; a beautiful apartment; and a therapeutic presence in Coop, the police officer who saved her life. Her mind won't let her recall the events of that night; the past is in the past...until the first Final Girl is found dead in her bathtub and the second Final Girl appears on Quincy's doorstep.   Blowing through Quincy's life like a hurricane, Sam seems intent on making her relive the trauma of her ordeal. When disturbing details about Lisa's death emerge, Quincy desperately tries to unravel Sam's truths from her lies while evading both the police and bloodthirsty reporters. Quincy knows that in order to survive she has to remember what really happened at Pine Cottage.   Because the only thing worse than being a Final Girl is being a dead one.

 

Carrie by Stephen King

ISBN: 9780307743664

Publication Date: 2011-08-30

Unpopular at school and subjected to her mother's religious fanaticism at home, Carrie White does not have it easy. But while she may be picked on by her classmates, she has a gift she's kept secret since she was a little girl: she can move things with her mind. Doors lock. Candles fall. Her ability has been both a power and a problem. And when she finds herself the recipient of a sudden act of kindness, Carrie feels like she's finally been given a chance to be normal. She hopes that the nightmare of her classmates' vicious taunts is over . . . but an unexpected and cruel prank turns her gift into a weapon of horror so destructive that the town may never recover.

 

The Dread of Difference by Barry Keith Grant (Editor)

ISBN: 9780292772458

Publication Date: 2015-04-01

"The Dread of Difference is a classic. Few film studies texts have been so widely read and so influential. It's rarely on the shelf at my university library, so continuously does it circulate. Now this new edition expands the already comprehensive coverage of gender in the horror film with new essays on recent developments such as the Hostel series and torture porn. Informative and enlightening, this updated classic is an essential reference for fans and students of horror movies."--Stephen Prince, editor of The Horror Film and author of Digital Visual Effects in Cinema: The Seduction of Reality "An impressive array of distinguished scholars . . . gazes deeply into the darkness and then forms a Dionysian chorus reaffirming that sexuality and the monstrous are indeed mated in many horror films."--Choice "An extremely useful introduction to recent thinking about gender issues within this genre."--Film Theory

 

Skin Shows by Jack Halberstam

ISBN: 9780822316633

Publication Date: 1995-08-22

In this examination of the monster as cultural object, Judith Halberstam offers a rereading of the monstrous that revises our view of the Gothic. Moving from the nineteenth century and the works of Shelley, Stevenson, Stoker, and Wilde to contemporary horror film exemplified by such movies as Silence of the Lambs, Texas Chainsaw Massacre, and Candyman, Skin Shows understands the Gothic as a versatile technology, a means of producing monsters that is constantly being rewritten by historically and culturally conditioned fears generated by a shared sense of otherness and difference. Deploying feminist and queer approaches to the monstrous body, Halberstam views the Gothic as a broad-based cultural phenomenon that supports and sustains the economic, social, and sexual hierarchies of the time. She resists familiar psychoanalytic critiques and cautions against any interpretive attempt to reduce the affective power of the monstrous to a single factor. The nineteenth-century monster is shown, for example, as configuring otherness as an amalgam of race, class, gender, and sexuality. Invoking Foucault, Halberstam describes the history of monsters in terms of its shifting relation to the body and its representations. As a result, her readings of familiar texts are radically new. She locates psychoanalysis itself within the gothic tradition and sees sexuality as a beast created in nineteenth century literature. Excessive interpretability, Halberstam argues, whether in film, literature, or in the culture at large, is the actual hallmark of monstrosity.

 

Annihilation by Jeff VanderMeer

ISBN: 9781250824042

Publication Date: 2024-07-30

SPECIAL TENTH ANNIVERSARY EDITION The Southern Reach Trilogy begins with Annihilation, the Nebula Award-winning novel that "reads as if Verne or Wellsian adventurers exploring a mysterious island had warped through into a Kafkaesque nightmare world" (Kim Stanley Robinson). Area X has been cut off from the rest of the world for years. Nature has reclaimed the last vestiges of human civilization. Expeditions into Area X have ended in disaster or death. In Annihilation, the first volume of Jeff VanderMeer's Southern Reach Trilogy, we join the latest expedition. The group is made up of four women: an anthropologist; a surveyor; a psychologist, the de facto leader; and the narrator, a biologist. Their mission is to map the terrain, record all observations of their surroundings and of one another, and, above all, avoid being contaminated by Area X itself. They arrive expecting the unexpected, and Area X delivers--they discover lifeforms that surpass understanding. But it's the secrets they carried across the border with them that change everything.

 

Through the Woods by Emily Carroll (Illustrator)

ISBN: 9781442465961

Publication Date: 2014-07-15

Discover a terrifying world in the woods in this collection of five hauntingly beautiful graphic stories that includes the online webcomic sensation "His Face All Red." Journey through the woods in this sinister, compellingly spooky collection that features four brand-new stories and one phenomenally popular tale in print for the first time. These are fairy tales gone seriously wrong, where you can travel to "Our Neighbor's House"--though coming back might be a problem. Or find yourself a young bride in a house that holds a terrible secret in "A Lady's Hands Are Cold." You might try to figure out what is haunting "My Friend Janna," or discover that your brother's fiancée may not be what she seems in "The Nesting Place." And of course you must revisit the horror of "His Face All Red," the breakout webcomic hit that has been gorgeously translated to the printed page. Already revered for her work online, award-winning comic creator Emily Carroll's stunning visual style and impeccable pacing is on grand display in this entrancing anthology, her print debut.