Spooky-book suggestions from Seattle literati

Here are more scary book suggestions from avid Seattle readers. Some contain supernatural elements, others feature real-world terror:

From Marilyn Dahl of the bookseller newsletter Shelf Awareness: "Relic" and "Reliquary" by Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child. In 1995's "Relic," something with a capital S is murdering visitors in New York's Museum of Natural History. "Reliquary," the 1997 sequel, goes in search of what lies beneath the museum in underground Manhattan. "Preston and Child, writing together or alone, are very good with monsters, or things that seem to be monsters at first," said Dahl.

From Seattle Times crime-fiction reviewer Adam Woog: "Grasshopper" by Barbara Vine. Barbara Vine is a pen name used by British crime fiction writer Ruth Rendell for her psychological thrillers. "Grasshopper," published in 2000, is the story of a claustrophobic young woman with a tragedy in her past who battles her fears by climbing roof tops. Woog also likes "Chicago Loop," a 1990 novel by Paul Theroux set in the sweltering summer of 1988, in which a Chicago businessman's deviant sexual obsessions get him in deep, deep trouble.

From über-librarian Nancy Pearl: "What I Didn't See" by Karen Joy Fowler. This 2010 collection by the author of "Sarah Canary" contains "beautifully written & subtly discomforting stories," says Pearl. She predicts that fans of Shirley Jackson ("The Haunting of Hill House"; "The Lottery") will take to it. "Everything is unstated — or unexplained. The stories are the sort of elastic realism that — from my perspective — edges on into horror."

Mary Ann Gwinn,

Seattle Times book editor