Halloween Haunt 2025: Our favorite Halloween books this year!

This Halloween season, we were able to pick up quite a few different Halloween-themed books online and from our favorite brick and mortar bookstores--Barnes & Noble and Books-a-Million! Here's a look at our favorite reads for 2025--plus a few favorites that hold a special place in our collection from Halloween past.

This was the year to pick up "It's the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown" books for us apparently. We found multiple iterations from over the years, including these two storybook-style books with art from the 1966 animated special. Both books appear to have a 67 or 68 copyright date.

Of course, this Look and Find book immerses readers in the world of Great Pumpkin and Peanuts.

This book, on the other hand, explores the making of an history of "Great Pumpkin" in a 40th anniversary edition.

We pick up a lot of Frankenstein and Universal Monsters books, but this "The Frankenstein Scapbooks" is one of our favorites. We stumbled upon it on eBay and found it to be full of Frankenstein movies, tv appearances and more--many of which we've never heard of before! It's an older book, including a Karloff intro, but we found it for a decent price and it's been well worth it for researching previous Frankenstein productions.

This magazine, "The Haunting History of Halloween" comes from the makers of Horror Hound and gives readers a look at Halloween the holiday and then dives into all the merch, movies and media from the past up to present day influences. This just came out as of Oct. 2025, so you can probably find it at your local magazine retailer. It's $15, which isn't unusual for magazines that are still around. I miss the $5.99 price point of yesteryear. Magazines...oh how we miss thee.

A look inside the "Haunting History" magazine.

Speaking of magazines and yesteryear, he's a blast from the past. We used to love picking up these Disney Adventures magazine back when we were into the Disney Afternoon cartoons. This one was always one of our favorites and just happened to show up on eBay. This takes us back to Halloween 1991. Nostalgia is great--and now you can buy it! And if anything about this haunts you it's likely that price. Under $2 for a magazine.

Some monsters cards in the Disney Adventures magazine.

As long as we're on nostalgia lane, we're going to cheat and throw in a book that isn't new to our collection this year. But this one is a major book from our Halloweens past: The Real Ghostbusters Magazine from fall 1989. The book pictured here is from our personal collection and is the exact book grandma bought me in Town Crier, located in Junction City, KS, 35 years ago.

We picked up multiple Universal Monsters books this year, but this one from the 90s was the most recent. The Paint 'n' Marker Book features Glenn Strange artwork on the cover, one of the last before it became Karloff all the time.

We've shown it before, but here's our Gods & Monsters book which influenced the movie about Frankenstein and Bride director James Whale.

From a previous haul, we picked up this History of Halloween magazine from Books-a-Million that features a look at the haunted holiday all the way back to its earliest days. You know the story--demons agreed to go off and leave our universe to the living as long as we remembered them each October 31. Wait, I think that was a Real Ghostbusters episode. Oh, come on, everyone watches Halloween Door at least once a year, right? It's as iconic as the Great Pumpkin and Garfield's Halloween specials.

These two books glow in the dark and feature the classic Stoker and Shelley novels of Dracula and Frankenstein. These came from Marshalls.

A few more kids books: a more recent Funko Universal Monsters Little Golden Book, a 90s Universal Monsters preschooler book we never knew existed and Poor Widdle Werewolf, a new kids book featuring Universal Monsters archetypes.

We really didn't have anywhere to showcase them, so we're throwing in a bonus. No, these aren't books, but they're physical media so they're dying just as fast.

It was great to get WNUF Halloween Special and it's sequel Out There Halloween Mega Tape on DVD. Unusual opinion, but we liked Mega Tape better than the original!

Also, we found this Last Drive-In Double Feature DVD featuring artwork from Cereal Creatures' Slasher Design collaborator Justin Osbourn.

And the best part: they were both at Walmart! Come on Walmart, keep physical media alive!

And how could we end our Halloween book cover without showcasing our own Halloween Haunt 2025 graphic novel? It's done very well this year featuring three stories and original artwork. We make it available in print and digital editions this year!