Looking to avoid the Trick-or-Treaters this Hallowe’en so you can curl-up and read a book? Canterbury Christ Church University’s English Literature academics share their Top Five books to give you a fright this Halloween:

• Rawblood (2015) by Catriona Ward

Set in a lonely Dartmoor manor house called Rawblood, this tale of gothic horror follows the household from the Victorian era up through World War I, and back again, as its inhabitants struggle against a curse that keeps them isolated and dooms them to die young. It opens in the sensuous yet oddly serrated voice of eleven-year-old Iris Villarca, who is forced to confront a dark family secret. Tense, chilling, and heart-breaking, Rawblood is a ‘Neo-Victorian’ ghost story that brings together the uncanny atmosphere of a nineteenth-century classic like The Turn of the Screw, with the innovative structure of a contemporary work like Cloud Atlas. A perfect Halloween read – Dr Susan Civale

• The Yellow Wall-Paper (1890) by Charlotte Perkins Gilman

The Yellow Wall-Paper makes for as disturbing a read as Edgar Allan Poe’s tales of horror. Like her better-known predecessor, Gilman exploits to great effect such gothic staples as the haunted house, the dread of confinement, the descent into madness. Much more than a quick, blood-curdling fix, this short story is an indictment of the destructive pressure to conform to a spurious notion of ‘true womanhood’. Sadly, this chimes with recent reports of the increase in mental health illness affecting young women who continue to be measured up against unrealistic standards of (social media-friendly) feminine perfection. Gilman’s story is scarily topical, and not just because of Halloween – Dr Stefania Ciocia

• The Monastery (1820) by Walter Scott

The Monastery turns All-Hallows’ Eve from a date on the calendar into a crucial plot point. What Scott offers is a Border romance three times over. It uses Melrose as a setting. It situates itself in the middle of the sixteenth century, at the historical divide between the old religion and the new. And its inclusion of a ghostly White Lady creates that same leaning ‘rather to the immaterial than the substantial world’ by which Halloween is marked. Ponderous in places, the novel borders on being one of those large, loose, baggy monsters which scare readers at this, or any other time of the year. But it is also a masterly mapping of what Hawthorne would later term that “neutral territory, somewhere between the real world and fairy-land, where the Actual and the Imaginary may meet, and each imbue itself with the nature of the other – Dr Peter Merchant

• Twilight Stories (1873) by Rhoda Broughton

Broughton’s Twilight Stories have a sardonic wit and apparently limitless pessimism which helps us to remember just how little we really know about the dark side of the nineteenth century – Professor Carolyn Oulton

• The Saga of Erik the Red (Eiríks saga rauða) by unknown

The walking dead, a seeress with cat-skin gloves, and encounters between Native Americans and Norse settlers in the Viking Age make this short Icelandic saga perfect reading material for Halloween. Discover the risks involved in praying to Thor for whale meat, and why you should bury your dead with a stake firmly hammered into their grave, in this early account of Europeans in Greenland and North America – Dr Michael Bintley