She can’t get enough of Jim Henson’s Labyrinth or The Dark Crystal – both of which have some decidedly weird and dark moments – but curls up in anxiety whenever she sees a picture of a gun or whenever there’s an especially creepy background shadow in a picture book spread. And it’s hard to predict what will or won’t resonate as scary with her.

She’s almost five and is a bit of a scaredy-cat. I decided to get in on the All Hallow’s Read fun this year and find a scary book to share with my daughter, which… was a challenge. It’s like choosing the perfect holiday gift for your friends and family, only with marginally more viscera and tentacled gods. Psychological suspense might bore your sister to tears, but she ADORES blood and guts. Your best friend might despise gore, but might love the existential dread of a Lovecraft novel. Your nephew might be a little tame and timid, but can’t get enough of campfire ghost stories. The book has to have the APPROPRIATE scare level for the person you have in mind. You’re trying to find a book that will scare your mother, your daughter, your pal, your co-worker – some real thought has to go into that selection.

It’s not just finding a book that YOU might find scary. Secondly, I love that there’s this aspect of All Hallow’s Read that’s all about figuring out your audience. I cry all the time (ask my wife – it’s a sickness), but scaring me while I’m sitting on the couch reading in the middle of the day? That’s a hard act to pull off. Personally, if a book can actually scare me, I find the experience way more affecting than a book that can make me cry.

Finding out that reading words on a printed page can actually chill you to the core of your being is a staggering, unrivaled experience, and it often gets dismissed by people who look down their nose at “genre” fiction. First of all, if you can actually find a book that really, truly scares you, it’s an amazing sensation. On the week of Halloween (or on the day itself), give someone you know – adult, kid, or in between – a scary book to read.

It’s all about… well, I’ll let Gaiman explain it himself: Before I get into my discussion of Jack Prelutsky’s The Wizard, I want to tell you about a fantastic Halloween reading tradition that’s sprung up over the past few years called All Hallow’s Read, which apparently originated with a blog post by Neil Gaiman in 2010.

Jack prelutsky nightmares