You may know already how the story ends but you love the feeling of fear and trepidation as you turn page after page... Reading a story that's able to scare you again and again is an absolute treat and a skill reserved for a very selected number of writers.

The following choices are only a small sample of our favourites so if you’ve already got yourideal Halloween costume ready and you’re all set when it comes to yourideal horror movie night, here are some suggestions we think would make for wickedly good reads...

Reader beware - you're in for a scare.

‘It Came from Beneath the Sink!’ by R.L. Stine

‘It Came from Beneath the Sink!’ by R.L. Stine Scholastic Hippo

As a child of the 90s, R.L. Stine’s spooky Goosebumps books defined most of my formative reading years. Their garishly illustrated covers - special hardback editions of which had light up eyes and made gnarly sounds - only added to the nervous anticipation of devouring them.

Oddly, the one that scared me most is probably the silliest in the series - a story about an evil sponge with glowing red peepers and a penchant for causing bad luck. Whoever finds it can’t get rid of it without dying - but it’s a children’s book, so a loophole is found in cuddling the sponge to death (not a bad way to go).

Unless you have trypophobia (a fear of objects with repetitive small holes), it’ll sound very un-scary - but it tapped into a legitimate fear of mine: the cupboard under the sink.