Witchy and Dark Books for Fall: 4 Spooky-Season Reads, Reviewed

I love matching my reading to the season, and fall means books about witches, faeries, and stories with a dark edge. These are four spooky-season reads I’ve picked up, from cozy to deeply unsettling, with my honest take on each.

1. Weyward by Emilia Hart

Weyward follows three women from a family of witches across three timelines: 1619, 1942, and 2019. I enjoyed the different timelines and the struggles specific to each era. It’s dark and deals with some heavy subjects, but the throughline is endurance and female power.

Best for: fans of multi-timeline stories and feminist witchy fiction.
My rating: 4/5

2. Emily Wilde’s Encyclopaedia of Faeries by Heather Fawcett

Emily Wilde’s Encyclopaedia of Faeries follows an academic who studies faeries and travels to a remote northern village to research the folk who live there. There’s a romance with a fellow professor and some suspense when a few of the folk turn out to be quite sinister.

It has a cozy vibe and the faerie lore is fascinating, but it’s slow in places, the romance felt sudden, and the ending didn’t fully satisfy me. The prose is a bit overwritten at times, and the main character is described as coldly clinical but often doesn’t act that way.

Best for: readers who want cozy, low-stakes fantasy with a scholarly heroine.
My rating: 3.5/5

3. Geek Love by Katherine Dunn

Geek Love was so disturbing that I felt like I was mentally recovering for a day after finishing it. The narrator is the daughter of a family that runs a traveling carnival, and the story moves between the present and the carnival’s past, when her parents deliberately engineered their children’s differences to create their own sideshow acts. That’s only the tip of the iceberg.

It starts slow, but by the second half I was racing to finish.

Best for: readers who want something truly strange and unsettling.
My rating: 4/5

4. The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath

I expected to love The Bell Jar, since angsty teen-girl lit is one of my favorite genres, but it didn’t click for me. Even knowing it’s based on Plath’s own life, I didn’t get much sense of what was happening in the narrator’s head, only what she was doing. It’s very short, which may be part of why it felt thin. I was also put off by how often she describes herself as looking “Chinese” when she’s tired.

Best for: anyone working through the classics or interested in Plath.
My rating: 3.5/5

Which of These Dark Books for Fall Should You Read?

• Witchy and empowering: Weyward
• Cozy fantasy: Emily Wilde’s Encyclopaedia of Faeries
• Truly unsettling: Geek Love
• A dark classic: The Bell Jar