Here are 100 books that Gustavo, the Shy Ghost fans have personally recommended if you like
Gustavo, the Shy Ghost.
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I’ve been a fan of horror stories since I was a kid. As an introverted and shy kid, I used to joke with my best friend about how I felt like a ghost and wished I had the power to be invisible. After I became a children’s book author/illustrator, I became fascinated with ghost picture books and started collecting them. Ghost picture books not only fulfilled my spooky necessities but also gave me warmth and heartfelt emotions.
A delightful, funny story of friendship, ghost chores, a spooky house and a professional haunter.
Meet Sir Simon, Super Scarer. He's a professional ghost who has been transferred to his first house. And just in time! He was getting tired of haunting bus stops and forests and potatoes. And to top it off, this house is occupied by an old lady -- they're the easiest to haunt!
But things don't go as planned when it turns out a KID comes with this old lady. Chester spots Simon immediately and peppers him with questions. Simon is exasperated. . . until he…
I’ve been a fan of horror stories since I was a kid. As an introverted and shy kid, I used to joke with my best friend about how I felt like a ghost and wished I had the power to be invisible. After I became a children’s book author/illustrator, I became fascinated with ghost picture books and started collecting them. Ghost picture books not only fulfilled my spooky necessities but also gave me warmth and heartfelt emotions.
Rebecca Green is one of my favorite artists and storytellers. So, when I saw her debut author-illustrator picture book, I was so thrilled.
This book is one of the most adorable books I’ve ever read. Written in like a guide step-by-step style, I learned not only how to befriend a ghost, but the fantastic art is a feast to my eyes.
I love the limited palette and soft pastel tone in the book. It created a vintage and warm feeling for the story.
What do you do when you meet a ghost? One: Provide the ghost with some of its favourite snacks, like mud tarts and earwax truffles. Two: Tell your ghost bedtime stories (ghosts love to be read to). Three: Make sure no one mistakes your ghost for whipped cream or a marshmallow when you aren't looking! If you follow the essential tips in How to Make Friends With a Ghost, you'll learn how a ghost can be the perfect companion for rest of your life and beyond...
"Green's picture-book debut is a guidebook that will be useful for anyone lucky enough…
I’ve been a fan of horror stories since I was a kid. As an introverted and shy kid, I used to joke with my best friend about how I felt like a ghost and wished I had the power to be invisible. After I became a children’s book author/illustrator, I became fascinated with ghost picture books and started collecting them. Ghost picture books not only fulfilled my spooky necessities but also gave me warmth and heartfelt emotions.
It’s a heartwarming book about how a friendship could cross any barrier. I love how Cat contrasted the world of Shinbi—the ghost, and Greem—the shadow. The dark, starry night and the colorful, greenish day.
I adore Cat Min’s watercolor artwork and how she handled the colors. The book is so beautiful and delightful!
Shinbi is not a particularly ghosty ghost. At night she likes making tiny bouquets of things, and gazing at the far away stars. Haunting? Not so much. Even if that’s what the other ghosts like.
In the daytime, in a meadow, sits a single rock, casting a single shadow, named Greem. He’d really like someone to talk to. But who? He writes one word on his lonely rock: “Hi” and hopes someone will see it. Sure enough, in the darkness of night, Shinbi finds the note! But who could have written it?
I’ve been a fan of horror stories since I was a kid. As an introverted and shy kid, I used to joke with my best friend about how I felt like a ghost and wished I had the power to be invisible. After I became a children’s book author/illustrator, I became fascinated with ghost picture books and started collecting them. Ghost picture books not only fulfilled my spooky necessities but also gave me warmth and heartfelt emotions.
The cover of this book immediately captured my attention. I love ghosts and quilts, so I knew this book was for me from the get-go.
I love the gloomy atmosphere of the artwork, in which the grey tone makes the little ghost who was a quilt stand out. The story itself is also so relatable and heartfelt. The ending and twist in the end give me a satisfactory feeling.
When you're a quilt instead of a sheet, being a ghost is hard! An adorable picture book for fans of Stumpkin and How to Make Friends with a Ghost.
Ghosts are supposed to be sheets, light as air and able to whirl and twirl and float and soar. But the little ghost who is a quilt can't whirl or twirl at all, and when he flies, he gets very hot.
He doesn't know why he's a quilt. His parents are both sheets, and so are all of his friends. (His great-grandmother was a lace curtain, but that doesn't really help…
I’m Catherine Cavendish – writer of Gothic and ghostly horror stories. I lived in a haunted house. It didn’t scare me because our ghost seemed to go out of her way to make us welcome. Elsewhere in the building was a different matter. This was occupied by a social club and in one room in particular, an entity targeted lone females, taking delight in poking and shoving them. Since we left there, I wonder about our friendly ghost. Does she continue to watch over her old home? As for the malevolent spirit – one encounter was quite enough for me! My experiences left me fascinated by the power of buildings to absorb its ghosts.
Alice – the main character – devastated by the loss of her eight-year-old daughter, buys a large, dilapidated house. It will be a big job – a real fixer-upper that she can get her teeth into – but it isn't long before she finds out hers is not your everyday normal building.
It starts with the voices and manifestations... and the children. Local legends and folklore abound. Soon Alice is swept up in events far out of her control in both time and dimension. and the house is a key player in this. It guards its secrets well.
This story stayed with me for a long time, and I believe Simon Bestwick deserves to be far better known than he is. I have yet to be disappointed in anything he has written.
Alice has returned to her old home town to put her life back in order.
378 Collarmill Road looks like an ordinary house. But sometimes, the world outside the windows isn't the one you expect to see; sometimes you'll turn around and find you're not alone.
An old flame of Alice's - John Revell - reluctantly comes to her aid when the house begins to reveal its secrets. The hill on which it sits is a place of legends - of Old Harry, the Beast of Crawbeck; of the Virgin of the Height and the mysterious Red Man - and…
For 10 years, I edited Morbid Curiosity magazine. I believe that curiosity is the most important aspect of being human. More than the simple desire to know things, curiosity is a tool as powerful as a scalpel or a searchlight. Curiosity is a way to effect change, in our own lives and in the world. Morbid Curiosity magazine taught me to believe in the power of story, especially in the form of memoirs. Only by telling our own stories can we overcome our fears and find inspiration in death. Investigating my own relationship with death led me to write This Morbid Life. These books illuminated my search.
After Erica Buist's father-in-law died at home, a week passed before she and her husband found the body. Grief -- and the realization that everyone she knew would someday die -- hit Buist so hard that she couldn't leave her apartment. As a way to heal, she decided to travel to seven festivals around the world where death is celebrated, where the dead are still treated as part of the family. Her subsequent adventures in Mexico, Nepal, Sicily, Thailand, Madagascar, Japan, Indonesia, and New Orleans are both poignant and heartening. Her sense of humor shines through her experiences and makes this book laugh-out-loud funny at points.
What if we responded to death... by throwing a party?
By the time Erica Buist's father-in-law Chris was discovered, upstairs in his bed, his book resting on his chest, he had been dead for over a week. She searched for answers (the artery-clogging cheeses in his fridge?) and tried to reason with herself (does daughter-in-law even feature in the grief hierarchy?) and eventually landed on an inevitable, uncomfortable truth: everybody dies.
With Mexico's Day of the Dead festivities as a starting point, Erica decided to confront death head-on by visiting seven death festivals around the world - one for every…
My seven novels all celebrate the natural world—while, I hope, telling a good story. Nature has always been my solace and delight. I’ve also had the honor of developing and directing an MFA in Nature Writing at Western Colorado University, one of the few nationwide programs to focus on cutting-edge environmental writing. While I mainly write novels, I’m the author of two nonfiction books and one play and the editor of three environmental anthologies. When not writing or teaching, I can be found sauntering around the West, especially in my home state of Colorado. I love travel and adventuring, and I like looking at birds, stars, clouds, and sea glass.
Another of my favorite authors, Erdrich, also has a big social and environmental justice theme throughout her works. There’s a delightful premise—a ghost haunts a bookstore in Minneapolis, and a mystery must be solved!—but it also takes on very serious subjects.
Set in 2019-2020, it covers the race riots, pandemic stress, and social justice issues. One thing I love is a book that has a seriousness of purpose but is still truly joyful and fun to read.
In this stunning and timely novel, Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award-winning author Louise Erdrich creates a wickedly funny ghost story, a tale of passion, of a complex marriage and of a woman's relentless errors.
Louise Erdrich's latest novel, The Sentence, asks what we owe to the living, the dead, to the reader and to the book. A small independent bookstore in Minneapolis is haunted from November 2019 to November 2020 by the store's most annoying customer. Flora dies on All Souls' Day, but…
I am fascinated by the places where cultures intersect and the means by which they do so. I am an American lucky to live in gorgeous San Miguel de Allende, Mexico, and previously in Hirakata, Japan; Shanghai, China; Suva, Fiji; and Oxford, England. Each move entailed a challenging but rewarding effort to absorb a new set of unwritten societal rules. A great way to grow is to immerse yourself in the unknown and have things you took for granted about how the world works suddenly come into question. Another is to learn from those who have gone before us, so I am delighted to share these wonderful books with you.
Under the Volcano is a difficult book worth the effort. Set in Quauhnahuac, now Cuernavaca, it follows the surreal last day in the life of bleakly alcoholic former British consul Geoffrey Firmin.
We witness interactions with his estranged wife, his half-brother, and a childhood friend—both of whom have probably had an affair with the wife—as well as various other undependable characters real and hallucinatory. For careful readers, Lowry offers a rich buffet of symbolism and allusions to the work of writers from Dante to Shakespeare.
I certainly missed a few of the references but enjoyed the hunt nonetheless. Under the Volcano features the foibles of British rather than American expats, but the lessons apply equally.
One of the twentieth century's great undisputed masterpieces, Malcolm Lowry's Under the Volcano includes an introduction by Michael Schmidt in Penguin Modern Classics.
It is the fiesta 'Day of the Dead' in the small Mexican town of Quauhnahuac. In the shadow of the volcano, ragged children beg coins to buy skulls made of chocolate, ugly pariah dogs roam the streets and Geoffrey Firmin - ex-consul, ex-husband, an alcoholic and a ruined man - is living out the last day of his life. Drowning himself in mescal while his former wife and half-brother look on, powerless to help him, the consul…
I have loved Halloween since I ran through the suburban streets of southern Connecticut with ears and a tail. For more than thirty years I’ve been researching and writing about the holiday, and each year I find something new. Most of all, I’m a Halloween advocate: At Halloween we can wrap our arms around the reality of the other 364 days and satirize, exorcize, and celebrate it. The joy of Halloween is not that it’s dark and we revel in that; it’s that Halloween can bring a bit of light and laughter into the darkness. And, of course, it’s big, creative, candy-fueled fun.
Haunted Air is a book of undated photos of adults and children in costume. Not all of them may be Halloween photographs (we dressed up on so many occasions back then!), but most of them are. I love the handmade costumes and makeup, the creepy masks, the way the costumes tie into popular culture and the sheer joy of imagination they exude. It’s a creepy book, in a good way. David Lynch wrote the forward.
The roots of Hallowe'en lie in the ancient pre-Christian Celtic festival of Samhain, a feast to mark the death of the old year and the birth of the new. It was believed that on this night the veil separating the worlds of the living and the dead grew thin and ruptured, allowing spirits to pass through and walk unseen but not unheard amongst men. The advent of Christianity saw the pagan festival subsumed in All Souls' Day, when across Europe the dead were mourned and venerated. Children and the poor, often masked or in outlandish costume, wandered the night begging…
When I was five my dad had to carry me, crying, out of the Salem Witch’s Dungeon. You’d think that would put a damper on my love of spooky things, but it absolutely did not! Bela Lugosi was my first crush. I set up Haunted Houses in my garage and read every single book my local library had on the Salem Witch Trials. I made my way from Bunnicula and The Halloween Tree, to books by Stephen King and Anne Rice. Halloween and horror will always have a special place in my heart, and yet…I still don’t let my legs dangle off my bed, lest the monsters get me.
Eastport is the most cursed city in the US and the residents are darn proud of it!
Unfortunately, Mallory hasn’t quite adapted to her new home and finds her parents’ spooky stories to their restaurant customers and the constant Halloween in the town embarrassing. None of this stuff is real, after all! But when Mallory sees the girl in white, things start happening that she can’t explain. Worse yet, she’s doing things she can’t explain. Dangerous things.
I loved this new take on the Lady in White urban legend, and as a huge fan of towns like Salem, where the Halloween vibe is year-round, I loved visiting Eastport, even if Mallory’s not a fan. This one has some truly scary scenes, but the story itself has a base that any kid will relate to, the struggle of fitting in.
For fans of Small Spaces and the Goosebumps series by R.L Stine comes a chilling story about a twelve-year old girl who must face down the most notorious ghost in her haunted East coast town to stop a centuries-old curse that threatens to destroy everything.
Mallory hasn't quite adapted to life in her new town of Eastport yet. Maybe it's because everyone is obsessed with keeping the town's reputation as the most cursed town in the US.
And thanks to the nightmares she's had since arriving, Mallory hardly sleeps. Combined with the unsettling sensation of being watched, she's quickly becoming…
